Obstacle Avoidance for Hyper-redundant snake Robots and one Dimensional flexible Bodies using Optimization

Midhun S Menon ； Ashitava Ghosal

《Proceedings of the 14th IFToMM World Congress》 14th-3 (2015/10) Pp. 391-397

https://doi.org/10.6567/IFToMM.14TH.WC.OS13.076

並列摘要

Robots with snake topology and large number of redundant degrees of freedom are extensively studied due to increased flexibility in motion planning. Such robots can navigate through narrow passages, avoid obstacles and find use in search and rescue. It is also finding increasing use in fields of medical robotics and surgery in the form of actuated endoscopes. This paper proposes a method to avoid obstacle for such snake robots using an optimization based approach. The path of the leading end of the snake robot and the obstacle field is assumed to be known a priori and the obstacles are assumed to be bounded by smooth and differentiable surfaces. The obstacle avoidance algorithm uses only the task space variables and it is shown that the entire length of the snake robot can avoid all the obstacles while executing the prescribed motion. It is also shown that motion of the snake robot is more natural looking as the motion of the individual links die down along the length of the snake robot. Numerical simulation results are shown to illustrate the effectiveness of the algorithm in two- and three-dimensional space.

並列關鍵字

Extended body ； Hyper-redundant ； motion planning ； obstacle avoidance ； optimization