Title: Obstacle avoidance for a non-holonomic snake robot in a narrow space

Authors: Yasunobu Hitaka; Masahiro Yokomichi; Hiroshi Hamamatsu

Addresses: Department of Control and Information System Engineering, Kitakyushu National College of Technology, 5-20-1 Shii, Kokuraminamiku, Kitakyushu, Fukuoka, 802-0985, Japan ' Department of Environmental Robotics, University of Miyazaki, 1-1, Gakuen Kibanadai-nishi, Miyazaki 889-2192, Japan ' Department of Control and Information System Engineering, Kitakyushu National College of Technology, 5-20-1 Shii, Kokuraminamiku, Kitakyushu, Fukuoka, 802-0985, Japan

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a strategy of obstacle avoidance for a non-holonomic snake robot in a narrow space. In our strategy, the motion of the snake robot is restricted to a gliding curve and the curve is designed such that the snake robot does not come into contact with both obstacles and walls. To generate a desired gliding curve, we use some kind of serpenoid curve which is like a trace of natural snakes and tune its shape. By our strategy, the obstacle avoidance is simplified to designing the gliding curve in two-dimensional field. In this paper, we denote details of our strategy and demonstrate the effectiveness of our strategy by numerical simulations.

Keywords: snake robots; non-holonomic robots; obstacle avoidance; narrow spaces; robot motion; gliding curves; numerical simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMA.2014.062332

International Journal of Mechatronics and Automation, 2014 Vol.4 No.2, pp.73 - 83

Accepted: 12 Nov 2013
Published online: 17 Jun 2014 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article