Motion control of a snake robot moving between two non-parallel planes

Abstract

A control method that makes the head of a snake robot follow an arbitrary trajectory on two non-parallel planes, including coexisting sloped and flat planes, is presented. We clarify an appropriate condition of contact between the robot and planes and design a controller for the part of the robot connecting the two planes that satisfies the contact condition. Assuming that the contact condition is satisfied, we derive a simplified model of the robot and design a controller for trajectory tracking of the robot’s head. The controller uses kinematic redundancy to avoid violating the limit of the joint angle and a collision between the robot and the edge of a plane. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated in experiments using an actual robot.

Keywords:

• Snake robot
• slope
• redundancy
• trajectory tracking

Acknowledgements

We thank Glenn Pennycook, MSc, from Edanz Group (www.edanzediting.com/ac) for editing a draft of this manuscript.

Notes

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed https://doi.org/10.1080/01691864.2018.1458653.

Additional information

Funding

This work was partially supported by the ImPACT Program of Council for Science, Technology and Innovation (Cabinet Office, Government of Japan).