Inertial-Measurement-Unit (IMU) Based Motion Tracking for Biomorphic Hyper-Redundant Snake Robot

Abstract

A 3D printed snakebot prototype is developed and experimentally validated in this paper. The structure is designed to allocate limited room for each functional module (including an external power module, battery power module, the wireless control & transmission module and some detective sensors) to ensure the snakebot work in different environments. For controlling and tracking the snakebot, a MEMS IMU (Micro-Electro-Mechanical-Systems Inertial Measurement Units) based snakebot motion tracking system is developed. To minimize the noise influence to tracking accuracy, three algorithms (low-pass filter, baseline calibration, and Kalman filter) are used to eliminate noise from IMU's acceleration data. Through signal processing, the IMU acceleration data can be effectively used for motion tracking. To evaluate the motion tracking algorithm efficiency, the result from a real-time video tracking is employed as a reference for comparison. The comparison results demonstrate high efficiency of the proposed IMU based motion tracking algorithm.