Event Location: NSH 1305

Abstract: Snake robots are ideally suited to highly confined environments because their small cross-sections and highly redundant kinematics allow them to enter and move through tight spaces with a high degree of dexterity. Despite these theoretical advantages, snake robots also pose a number of practical challenges that have limited their usefulness in the field, compared to wheeled and tracked robots. These challenges come in the form of more complex interaction with the environment, decreased system reliability due to the serial nature of the robot’s design, and the need to coordinate a large number of degrees of freedom.

The proposed contributions of this thesis address these issues. To better understand the motion of snake robots, it introduces a novel body frame called the virtual chassis. This body frame remains consistent with the snake robot’s overall shape, and as such tends to approximately separate the robot’s internal and external motion. To reliably and accurately sense the robot’s pose and shape we present new techniques for robust state estimation that leverage the redundancies in the distributed sensing capabilities of our group’s articulated snake robots. Finally, to provide intuitive high-level autonomous behaviors, this thesis extends our lab’s existing gait-based control framework to develop gait-based compliant control.

To demonstrate these contributions in a practical application, they will be used to enable our snake robots to navigate and map a real-world underground pipe network. This proposed task will leverage the unique capabilities of snake robots to locomote further and provide a more accurate estimate of the pipe than would normally be possible with traditional wheeled or tracked robots.

Committee:Howie Choset, Chair

George Kantor

Chris Atkeson

Art Kuo, University of Michigan