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Passive joint control of a snake robot by rolling motion

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Abstract

Snake robots are capable of adapting to difficult situations, such as cluttered environments, using its many degrees of freedom. However, if one of the joints gets passive, it is generally very difficult to achieve ordinary performance. In this paper, control of a passive joint using rolling motion is considered, with the use of crawler gait in mind. Crawler gait is a state-of-the-art motion pattern for snake robots that is capable of moving on uneven terrain, but if there is a passive joint, the motion can be interrupted by freely moving part of the robot itself. As a key to solving this difficulty, this paper proposes to use the rolling motion, which has not been used in controlling a passive joint. A simplified model is proposed to consider the control, and based on this, one simple controller is adopted. The validity of the idea of using rolling motion is tested by numerical simulations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical Systems Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering, Nagoya University, Nagoya, 464-8603, Japan

    Ryo Ariizumi

  2. Department of Mechanical Engineering and Science, Graduate School of Engineering, Kyoto University, Kyoto, 606-8501, Japan

    Kentaro Koshio & Fumitoshi Matsuno

  3. Department of Mechanical and Intelligent Systems Engineering, Graduate School of Information Science and Engineering, The University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo, 182-8585, Japan

    Motoyasu Tanaka

Authors
  1. Ryo Ariizumi
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  2. Kentaro Koshio
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  3. Motoyasu Tanaka
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  4. Fumitoshi Matsuno
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Correspondence to Ryo Ariizumi.

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This work was presented in part at the 3rd International Symposium on Swarm Behavior and Bio-Inspired Robotics (Okinawa, Japan, November 20–22, 2019)

This work was supported by the ImPACT Program of the Council for Science, Technology and Innovation (Cabinet Office, Government of Japan)

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Ariizumi, R., Koshio, K., Tanaka, M. et al. Passive joint control of a snake robot by rolling motion. Artif Life Robotics 25, 503–512 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10015-020-00643-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10015-020-00643-1

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