Title
Snakes on a plan: Toward combining planning and control
Abstract
Highly articulated robot locomotion systems, such as snake robots, present special motion planning challenges. They possess many degrees of freedom, and therefore are modeled by a high dimensional configuration space which must be searched to plan a path. Kinematic and dynamic constraints further complicate the selection of effective controls. Finally, snake robots often have multiple modes of interaction with the terrain as contacts are made and broken, leading to complex and imperfect motion models. We believe that the space of useful controls that provides desirable motions, however, is much smaller. Useful net motions for such systems are often generated via gaits, or cyclic motions in the shape space. Gaits transform a high-dimensional continuum search into a relatively tractable discrete search. In this paper, we put forward a framework which allows a planner to generate paths in a low dimensional work space and select among gaits, pre-planned motions in the robot's shape space. The contribution of this paper rests on the “virtual chassis” which is a choice of body frame for the snake robot that allows the planner to efficiently select among and plan with gaits to direct the robot along the work space path. We demonstrate this planner running on a simulated snake robot navigating through a variety of clutter scenarios. The virtual chassis also has the benefit of allowing us to generalize notions of controllability to gait motions.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1109/ICRA.2013.6631317
Robotics and Automation
Keywords
Field
DocType
controllability,mobile robots,motion control,path planning,clutter scenarios,controllability,gait motion control,motion planning,path planning,robot shape space,snake robots,virtual chassis
Motion planning,Robot control,Computer vision,Motion control,Control theory,Snake-arm robot,Artificial intelligence,Engineering,Robot,Mobile robot,Articulated robot,Configuration space
Conference
Volume
Issue
ISSN
2013
1
1050-4729
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4673-5641-1
3
0.40
References 
Authors
15
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ross L. Hatton122922.72
Ross A. Knepper233923.97
Howie Choset32826257.12
David Rollinson4877.23
Chaohui Gong5478.99
Enric Galceran623613.50