Abstract
A unified method for designing the motion of a snake robot negotiating complicated pipe structures is presented. Such robots moving inside pipes must deal with various “obstacles,” such as junctions, bends, diameter changes, shears, and blockages. To surmount these obstacles, we propose a method that enables the robot to adapt to multiple pipe structures in a unified way. This method also applies to motion that is necessary to pass between the inside and the outside of a pipe. We designed the target form of the snake robot using two helices connected by an arbitrary shape. This method can be applied to various obstacles by designing a part of the target form specifically for given obstacles. The robot negotiates obstacles under shift control by employing a rolling motion. Considering the slip between the robot and the pipe, the model expands the method to cover cases where two helices have different properties. We demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method in various experiments.
Highlights
Despite their simple body configuration and lack of limbs, biological snakes move in a wide variety of environments, such as sandy and muddy places, in trees, and in narrow spaces
The motion and the nervous system of biological snakes is utilized as the Central Pattern Generator (CPG) (Crespi and Ijspeert, 2008; Wu and Ma, 2013; Sartoretti et al, 2019)
We propose a “unified” method that enables a snake robot to deal with all obstacles in Figure 1A, some of which have not yet been overcome and the others of which have already been overcome, just by altering the target form of the robot partially depending on the obstacle
Summary
Despite their simple body configuration and lack of limbs, biological snakes move in a wide variety of environments, such as sandy and muddy places, in trees, and in narrow spaces. Snake robots with simple structures formed from repeating connecting modules have been developed and can perform various kinds of locomotion. They are expected to be used in dangerous situations, such as rescue work and infrastructure inspections, especially when spaces are narrow and inaccessible to humans, such as inside pipes. Controlling snake robots is a challenge because of their redundancy, and much research has been conducted to overcome this difficulty. The research that apply the motion observed in biological snakes, such as the undulation on the plane (Hirose, 1987) and the locomotion utilizing obstacles (Kano et al, 2018) into the engineering control of the snake robot has been done. The motion and the nervous system of biological snakes is utilized as the Central Pattern Generator (CPG) (Crespi and Ijspeert, 2008; Wu and Ma, 2013; Sartoretti et al, 2019)
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