The design of a hyper-redundant serial-linkage snake robot is the focus of this paper. The snake, which consists of many fully enclosed actuators, incorporates a modular architecture. In our design, which we call the Unified Snake, we consider size, weight, power, and speed tradeoffs. Each module includes a motor and gear train, an SMA wire actuated bistable brake, custom electronics featuring several different sensors, and a custom intermodule connector. In addition to describing the Unified Snake modules, we also discuss the specialized head and tail modules on the robot and the software that coordinates the motion.

/pdf/design-and-architecture-of-the-unified-modular-snake-robot-3ec6gch4yq.pdf

Design and architecture of the unified modular snake robot

Review of snake robots in constrained environments

Many practical optimization problems in robotics involve multiple competing objectives - from design trade-offs to performance metrics of the physical system such as speed and energy efficiency. Proper treatment of these objective functions, while commonplace in fields such as economics, is often overlooked in robotics. Additionally, optimization of the performance of robotic systems can be restricted due to the expensive nature of testing control parameters on a physical system. This paper presents a multi-objective optimization (MOO) algorithm for expensive-to-evaluate functions that generates a Pareto set of solutions. This algorithm is compared against another leading MOO algorithm, and then used to optimize the speed and head stability of the sidewinding gait for a snake robot.

/pdf/expensive-multiobjective-optimization-for-robotics-1j37e6twh3.pdf

Expensive multiobjective optimization for robotics

We present a method of achieving autonomous compliant behavior in snake robots. This behavior allows snake robots to adapt to changes in its environment, e.g. changes in pipe diameter while climbing. To simplify the task of high-level closed-loop control, the controller uses a low-dimensional gait framework that has been previously used for open-loop trajectory generation. We use an extended Kalman filter (EKF) to estimate the gait parameters that best represent the robot's shape, and then choose a control space of parameters relative to that state. Because this controller specifies whole-body motions of the robot, we are able to generate compliant behavior, even though the joints of the robot contain stiff gear ratios with no mechanical compliance or torque sensing.

/pdf/gait-based-compliant-control-for-snake-robots-1nhzvn6mgu.pdf

Gait-based compliant control for snake robots

In this paper we introduce a body-compliant Modular Snake Robot executing rolling gaits on different cylindrical geometries. In the state of the art it is considered that an active shape adaptation to the terrain while a gait is executed produces better performances than a simple pre-programmed stiff motion without feedback. Several attempts to reproduce such behaviors in snake robots range from compliant shape controllers (acting in joint space) to torque control strategies of elastic actuated joints. In our proposal, we incorporate compliant elements in a modular snake robot structure to passively adapt the robot's shape to the environment. The gait control remains simple by acting directly in the robot's joint space with known gait generation schemes. To validate our results we performed experiments with compliant modular snake robots rolling on pipes with different geometry characteristics such as different diameters, smooth surfaces, surfaces with presence of obstacles (terrain bumps), and considerable changes in diameter in a single robot run. We evaluated the performance across different robot's body-compliance values, measuring the speed of locomotion as well as the power consumption. Our results show that providing a good selection of body compliant elements is a way to maintain high locomotion performance (at least while rolling on pipes) without including additional complex control artifacts to the simple open-loop cyclic gait controller.

Compliant snake robot locomotion on horizontal pipes

State estimation for snake robots

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State estimation for snake robots