MANEUVERING CONTROL OF A PLANAR SNAKE ROBOT LOCOMOTION USING A COMBINED HEADING-VELOCITY-SHAPE STRATEGY

This paper presents a combined shape-velocity-heading control for planar snake robots to navigate confined environments using the lateral undulatory locomotion. The kinematics and dynamics of shape-changing were studied to find the connection between the gait parameters of the Serpenoid curve and the width of the robot locomotion while following the desired trajectories. The phase shift in between joint angles was identified as the parameter of interest for controlling the width of snake robots. The controller includes an outer-loop to adjust the parameters of the lateral undulation gait to achieve the desired shape, linear velocity, and heading direction in the Cartesian space while the inner-loop determines the torques at each joint of the snake robot to follow the desired joint trajectories. The control algorithm was tested on a planar 6-link snake robot model and was examined in different simulation cases of adjusting the robot's shape to the desired width while maintaining the desired heading direction and linear velocity. The simulation results have shown the feasibility and effectiveness of the combined heading, velocity, and shape control algorithm in the navigation of a 6-link snake robot in simple and complex simulated multichannel cluttered environments.