Advances in Bio-Inspired Robots

This book covers three major topics, specifically Biomimetic Robot Design, Mechanical System Design from Bio-Inspiration, and Bio-Inspired Analysis on A Mechanical System. The Biomimetic Robot Design part introduces research on flexible jumping robots, snake robots, and small flying robots, while the Mechanical System Design from Bio-Inspiration part introduces Bioinspired Divide-and-Conquer Design Methodology, Modular Cable-Driven Human-Like Robotic Arm andWall-Climbing Robot. Finally, in the Bio-Inspired Analysis on A Mechanical System part, research contents on the control strategy of Surgical Assistant Robot, modeling of Underwater Thruster, and optimization of Humanoid Robot are introduced

Design of a swimming snake robot

This paper presents the design and realization of a bioinspired snake robot that can move on the water surface. This robot mimics the locomotion strategies of anguilliform fishes such as eels and lampreys, which have a thin, long, cylindrical body and whose movement resembles the crawling of a snake. An autonomous underwater vehicle with such a shape can pass through narrow crevices and reach places inaccessible to other swimming robots. Moreover, this locomotion entails a high energy efficiency and outstanding agility in maneuvers. The body of the bioinspired robot consists of a modular structure in which each module contains a battery, the electronic board, and a servo motor that drives the following module. The head of the robot has a different shape as it contains a camera and an ultrasonic sensor used to detect obstacles. In addition to the design of the robot, this paper also describes the implementation of the kinematic model

Design and Steering Control of a Center-Articulated Mobile Robot Module

This paper discusses the design and steering control for an autonomous modular mobile robot. The module is designed with a center-articulated steering joint to minimize the number of actuators used in the chain. We propose a feedback control law which allows steering between configurations in the plane and show its application as a parking control to dock modules together. The control law is designed by Lyapunov techniques and relies on the equations of the robot in polar coordinates. A set of experiments have been carried out to show the performance of the proposed approach. The design is intended to endow individual wheeled modules with the capability to merge and make a single snake-like robot to take advantage of the benefits of modular robotics

Programación de gaits y adquisición de datos para robots serpiente

Durante años, los robots modulares han servido como plataformas para experimentar con diferentes esquemas de locomoción. Los robots serpiente en especial, son muy utilizados debido al potencial que estos robots poseen para atravesar diferentes obstáculos, razón por la cual la locomoción de estos robots debe ser modelada para no solo entender la física del movimiento del robot, sino también, para poder realizar control sobre los diferentes esquemas de locomoción posibles, con el fin de hacer estos robots cada vez más autónomos. Es por esto que se hace necesario desarrollar un software de control que permita al usuario controlar un Modular Snake Robot y para esto se crearon algunas interfaces de control por medio de las cuales es posible diseñar y experimentar con un robot serpiente. Para entender el comportamiento de estos robots es necesario adquirir variables de los servomotores que lo conforman para así analizar y determinar cual gait fue ejecutado de la mejor forma. Para esto se presenta una interfaz que permite manipular y analizar los datos obtenidos en el proceso de adquisición de datos.For years, modular robots have served as platforms to experiment with different patterns of locomotion. Especially snake robots are widely used because of the potential that these robots have to move through different obstacles, that s the cause robots locomotion must be modeled not only to understand the physics of motion of the robot, but also to perform different control schemes possible locomotion, in order to make these more autonomous robots. For that reason it s necessary to develop the appropriate software that allows the user to control a Modular Snake Robot and for this cause some control interfaces were created that s possible to design and experiment with a snake robot. To understand the behavior of these robots it s necessary to acquire variables that comprise the servomotors to analyze and determine which gait was executed in the best way. This work shows an interface that allows you to manipulate and analyze the data in the data acquisition process.Ingeniero (a) ElectrónicoPregrad

On the dynamic analysis of a novel snake robot: preliminary results

In recent years, modular robotics has become of great interest in the robotics community. Among them, snake robots are among the most flexible and versatile type of mobile robots, well-suited to a large number of applications, such as exploration and inspection tasks, participation to search and rescue missions etc. The present paper investigates the design of a novel snake robot, named Rese_Q01, currently being designed at Politecnico di Torino. In order to characterise the dynamic behaviour of the robot, a simple vehicle dynamics model is developed and basic simulations are carried out for a first implementation of a unit consisting of two modules. Preliminary results show the influence of the robot velocity on the trajectory curvature radius, as well as the effect of different ground/tire friction conditions. This analysis is the first step in order to develop effective control strategies for robot trajectories

A Proposal for a Multi-Drive Heterogeneous Modular Pipe- Inspection Micro-Robot

This paper presents the architecture used to develop a micro-robot for narrow pipes inspection. Both the electromechanical design and the control scheme will be described. In pipe environments it is very useful to have a method to retrieve information of the state of the inside part of the pipes in order to detect damages, breaks and holes. Due to the di_erent types of pipes that exists, a modular approach with di_erent types of modules has been chosen in order to be able to adapt to the shape of the pipe and to chose the most appropriate gait. The micro-robot has been designed for narrow pipes, a _eld in which there are not many prototypes. The robot incorporates a camera module for visual inspection and several drive modules for locomotion and turn (helicoidal, inchworm, two degrees of freedom rotation). The control scheme is based on semi-distributed behavior control and is also described. A simulation environment is also presented for prototypes testing