Kinematics, dynamics, and control of underwater robotic snake based on a rigid-soft unified model

摘要

ABSTRACTWith the advancement of underwater biomimetic robots, many kinds of underwater snake robots have been developed to perform various marine inspection and maintenance operations. This paper introduces an innovative biomimetic extension to underwater robotic vehicles, an underwater rigid-soft snake robot, which is operated by a combination of rigid propulsion modules and soft joint modules. The essential point is how to jointly mathematically model soft joints and rigid modules with different physical property. The Constant Curvature assumption is widely used in modeling of soft module robots. However, the limitation of this assumption is that it can't accurately describe the deformation of soft robots when performing dynamic tasks. We propose a methodology, rigid-soft unified model, for kinematic and dynamic modeling by viewing soft joint as flexible universal joint. The motion analysis of the robot under the influence of water flow in different postures is completed. Furthermore, we develop a closed loop hierarchical trajectory controller for the snake robot. Especially in the part of dynamic control system, we compare the tracking performance of different controllers.KEYWORDS: Robot dynamicsunderwater roboticsdynamic controlrigid-soft robots AcknowledgementsThis research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grant 52275053, in part by Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant 3132022352, and in part by the Open Foundation of the State Key Laboratory of Fluid Power and Mechatronic Systems under Grant GZKF-202112.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Declaration of competing interestThe authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.Data availability statementData available on request due to privacy/ethical restrictions.Authorship contribution statementJunhao Zhang: Methodology, Investigation, Data curation, Formal analysis, Visualization, Writing – original draft. Yinglong Chen: Methodology, Funding acquisition, Supervision, Writing – review & editing. Yongjun Gong: Funding acquisition, Project administration.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities: [Grant Number 3132022352]; National Natural Science Foundation of China: [Grant Number 52275053]; Open Foundation of the State Key Laboratory of Fluid Power and Mechatronic Systems: [Grant Number GZKF-202112].