Abstract
In nature, snakes can gracefully traverse a wide range of different and complex environments. Snake robots that can mimic this behaviour could be fitted with sensors and transport tools to hazardous or confined areas that other robots and humans are unable to access. In order to carry out such tasks, snake robots must have a high degree of awareness of their surroundings (i.e., perception-driven locomotion) and be capable of efficient obstacle exploitation (i.e., obstacle-aided locomotion) to gain propulsion. These aspects are pivotal in order to realise the large variety of possible snake robot applications in real-life operations such as fire-fighting, industrial inspection, search-and-rescue, and more. In this paper, we survey and discuss the state of the art, challenges, and possibilities of perception-driven obstacle-aided locomotion for snake robots. To this end, different levels of autonomy are identified for snake robots and categorised into environmental complexity, mission complexity, and external system independence. From this perspective, we present a step-wise approach on how to increment snake robot abilities within guidance, navigation, and control in order to target the different levels of autonomy. Pertinent to snake robots, we focus on current strategies for snake robot locomotion in the presence of obstacles. Moreover, we put obstacle-aided locomotion into the context of perception and mapping. Finally, we present an overview of relevant key technologies and methods within environment perception, mapping, and representation that constitute important aspects of perception-driven obstacle-aided locomotion.
Highlights
Bio-inspired robots have developed rapidly in recent years
We propose the identification of different levels of autonomy, such as environmental complexity, mission complexity, and external system dependence
We have chosen an agile development-based and rapid-prototyping approach where we currently focus on refining the steps necessary in order to transit to the immediate levels, and leave the details for the higher levels until more information is available on the exact requirements and functionalities needed for these levels
Summary
Bio-inspired robots have developed rapidly in recent years. Despite the great success of bio-robotics in mimicking biological snakes, there is still a large gap between the performance of bio-mimetic robot snakes and biological snakes. The environment perception, mapping, and representation is of fundamental importance for the model To highlight this concept even further, we adopt the term perception-driven obstacle-aided locomotion as locomotion where the snake robot utilises a sensory-perceptual system to exploit the surrounding operational space and identifies walls, obstacles, or other external objects for means of propulsion [5]. Different levels of autonomy can be identified from an operational point of view Based on this idea, the so-called framework of autonomy levels for unmanned systems (ALFUS) [6] is successively adopted and applied to provide a more in-depth overview for the design of snake robot perception-driven obstacle-aided locomotion. The autonomy and technology readiness assessment (ATRA) framework [7,8] is adopted and presented to better understand the design of these systems
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