HISSbot: Sidewinding with a Soft Snake Robot

Snake robots are characterized by their ability to navigate through small spaces and loose terrain by utilizing efficient cyclic forms of locomotion. Soft snake robots are a subset of these robots which utilize soft, compliant actuators to produce movement. Prior work on soft snake robots has primarily focused on planar gaits, such as undulation. More efficient spatial gaits, such as sidewinding, are unexplored gaits for soft snake robots. We propose a novel means of constructing a soft snake robot capable of sidewinding, and introduce the Helical Inflating Soft Snake Robot (HISSbot). We validate this actuation through the physical HISSbot, and demonstrate its ability to sidewind across various surfaces. Our tests show robustness in locomotion through low-friction and granular media.Comment: 7 pages, 9 figures, to be published in RoboSoft 202

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

A mosaic of eyes

Autonomous navigation is a traditional research topic in intelligent robotics and vehicles, which requires a robot to perceive its environment through onboard sensors such as cameras or laser scanners, to enable it to drive to its goal. Most research to date has focused on the development of a large and smart brain to gain autonomous capability for robots. There are three fundamental questions to be answered by an autonomous mobile robot: 1) Where am I going? 2) Where am I? and 3) How do I get there? To answer these basic questions, a robot requires a massive spatial memory and considerable computational resources to accomplish perception, localization, path planning, and control. It is not yet possible to deliver the centralized intelligence required for our real-life applications, such as autonomous ground vehicles and wheelchairs in care centers. In fact, most autonomous robots try to mimic how humans navigate, interpreting images taken by cameras and then taking decisions accordingly. They may encounter the following difficulties

Manipulability analysis of a snake robot without lateral constraint for head position control

Two dynamic manipulability criteria of a snake robot with sideways slipping are proposed with the application to head trajectory tracking control in mind. The singular posture, which is crucial in head tracking control, is characterized by the manipulability and examined for families of typical robot shapes. Differences in the singular postures from those of the robot with lateral constraints, which have not been clear in previous studies, are clarified in the analysis. In addition to the examination of local properties using the concept of manipulability, we discuss the effect of isotropic friction as a global property. It is well known that, at least empirically, a snake robot needs anisotropy in friction to move by serpentine locomotion if there are no objects for it to push around. From the point of view of integrability, we show one of the necessary conditions for uncontrollability is satisfied if the friction is isotropic