Kinematic control of a cable-driven snake-like manipulator for deep-water based on fuzzy PID controller

Abstract

The traditional deep-water manipulators have several problems to work in confined spaces, such as large volume, complex structure, and inability. To solve these problems, a novel cable-driven snake-like manipulator robot for deep-water is proposed. In this study, the structure design of the cable-driven snake-like manipulator robot is first introduced. Then, we establish the kinematics model of the proposed cable-driven snake-like manipulator robot, which includes three parts: motor-cable kinematics, cable-joint kinematics, and joint-end kinematics. Especially, a tip-following algorithm (Supplemental Material) is presented to fit the confined and complicated underwater scenarios. Furthermore, a kinematics control strategy based on fuzzy PID controller is presented to reduce the tracking error caused by transmission mechanism, and the simulation of the cable-driven snake-like manipulator is carried out based on the MATLAB. The results demonstrate that the tracking error is less than 0.04 mm, which shows the proposed control strategy is effective.