Smake-like robot (Image provided by SIA)

Snake-like robot can move in a variety of environments, like the flat ground, grass, forests, swamps, underwater and so on, in which the driving force of snake-like robot comes from the interaction between the body and the environment. Hence, the research on the interaction between the robot and the environment has a significant importance to the control of snake-like robot.

Recently, a modeling and control method based on the theory of fiber bundles was proposed by the bionic robot group from State Key Laboratory of Robotics, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Environmental information modeling acts as constraint information, and the snake-like robot's configuration space is abstracted as master fiber bundle space, besides, the robot’s overall motion corresponds to fiber space of fiber bundle and body gait corresponds to bottom space as well as using constraint information to find the connection relationship between the whole movement of the snake-like robot with its body gait in this method. With this connection relationship snake-like robot movement gait can be visually designed and at the same time, the relationship can also simplify snake-like robot dynamics equations to get the minimum friction torque compensation which can be used to optimize the interaction between robot and environment.

The corresponding research results of Shenyang Institute Automation publish in SCIENCE CHINA Information Sciences which is a famous journal in the field of information science (paper information: GUO Xian, MA ShuGen, LI Bin, WANG MingHui, WANG YueChao. Modelling and optimal torque control of a snake-like robot based on the fiber bundle theory. SCIENCE CHINA Information Sciences, 2015, 58(3): 032205(13)). This program also receives strong support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China and other related projects.

Source: State Key Laboratory of Robotics