Snakes on an inclined plane: Learning an adaptive sidewinding motion for changing slopes

Gong, Chaohui; Tesch, Matthew; Rollinson, David; Choset, Howie

doi:10.1109/iros.2014.6942697

Cited by 16 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…grasping [48][49][50], polishing [51] and climbing [52,53] robots (for a review, see [54]). Although many snake robots have used compliance in control to adapt overall body shape to obstacles [55][56][57][58], the use of mechanical compliance to better conform to surfaces locally was less considered [56,59], especially for improving stability. These considerations inspired us to test our second hypothesis that body compliance improves surface contact statistically and reduces roll instability.…”

Section: Comparison With Snakesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Robotic modelling of snake traversing large, smooth obstacles reveals stability benefits of body compliance

2020

R. Soc. open sci.

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Snakes can move through almost any terrain. Although their locomotion on flat surfaces using planar gaits is inherently stable, when snakes deform their body out of plane to traverse complex terrain, maintaining stability becomes a challenge. On trees and desert dunes, snakes grip branches or brace against depressed sand for stability. However, how they stably surmount obstacles like boulders too large and smooth to gain such "anchor points" is less understood. Similarly, snake robots are challenged to stably traverse large, smooth obstacles for search and rescue and building inspection. Our recent study discovered that snakes combine body lateral undulation and cantilevering to stably traverse large steps. Here, we developed a snake robot with this gait and snake-like anisotropic friction and used it as a physical model to understand stability principles. The robot traversed steps as high as a third of its body length rapidly and stably. However, on higher steps, it was more likely to fail due to more frequent rolling and flipping over, which was absent in the snake with a compliant body. Adding body compliance reduced the robot's roll instability by statistically improving surface contact, without reducing speed. Besides advancing understanding of snake locomotion, our robot achieved high traversal speed surpassing most previous snake robots and approaching snakes, while maintaining high traversal probability.

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Section: Comparison With Snakesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Robotic modelling of snake traversing large, smooth obstacles reveals stability benefits of body compliance

2020

R. Soc. open sci.

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“…to derive some properties of the environment. As an example, [53] showed that the tilt angle of a slope can be inferred by only using the snake robot's state estimated from the joint angles, and used this information to adapt the behaviour of sidewinding and maximise the travelling speed. In [52], a heavily bioinspired method was developed based on the mechanics and neural control locomotion of a worm which also uses a serpentine motion.…”

Section: Survey Of Environment Perception For Locomotion In Snake Robotsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perception-Driven Obstacle-Aided Locomotion for Snake Robots: The State of the Art, Challenges and Possibilities †

et al. 2017

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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.

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“…Through abundant experiments, the sinusoidbased method has been proven simplicity for imitating real snake locomotion and generating gaits of snakelike robots [12,24,25]. The ACM-R3 [2], controlled by active cord mechanism, consisted of 20 links and was capable of only 2D motion.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards autonomous locomotion: CPG-based control of smooth 3D slithering gait transition of a snake-like robot

et al. 2017

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Snake-like robots with 3D locomotion ability have significant advantages of adaptive travelling in diverse complex terrain over traditional legged or wheeled mobile robots. Despite numerous developed gaits, these snake-like robots suffer from unsmooth gait transitions by changing the locomotion speed, direction, and body shape, which would potentially cause undesired movement and abnormal torque. Hence, there exists a knowledge gap for snake-like robots to achieve autonomous locomotion. To address this problem, this paper presents the smooth slithering gait transition control based on a lightweight central pattern generator (CPG) model for snake-like robots. First, based on the convergence behavior of the gradient system, a lightweight CPG model with fast computing time was designed and compared with other widely adopted CPG models. Then, by reshaping the body into a more stable geometry, the slithering gait was modified, and studied based on the proposed CPG model, including the gait transition of locomotion speed, moving direction, and body shape. In contrast to sinusoid-based method, extensive simulations and prototype experiments finally demonstrated that smooth slithering gait transition can be effectively achieved using the proposed CPG-based control method without generating undesired locomotion and abnormal torque.

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Snakes on an inclined plane: Learning an adaptive sidewinding motion for changing slopes

Cited by 16 publications

References 10 publications

Robotic modelling of snake traversing large, smooth obstacles reveals stability benefits of body compliance

Robotic modelling of snake traversing large, smooth obstacles reveals stability benefits of body compliance

Perception-Driven Obstacle-Aided Locomotion for Snake Robots: The State of the Art, Challenges and Possibilities †

Towards autonomous locomotion: CPG-based control of smooth 3D slithering gait transition of a snake-like robot

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