Obstacle avoidance of a non-holonomic snake robot by tracking a desired gliding curve

Abstract

Snake robots move by undulating their slender body. From the fact, it is expected that a snake robot can pass through a narrow hallway even if there are some obstacles by adjusting its gliding form not to contact with both obstacles and walls. In this paper, we present a tracking control method for the obstacle avoidance. It is based on feedback linearization and imposes a holonomic control constraint on the snake robot possessing a nonholonomic property. By our method, the snake robot moves along the desired gliding curve designed to achieve the obstacle avoidance even if there are initial errors or impulse disturbances. In this paper, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our idea for the obstacle avoidance by numerical simulations.