A Serpentine Curve Based Motion Planning Method for Cable-Driven Snake Robots

Cable-driven snake robots have the ability to slither around narrow space owing to slender structure and high degrees of freedom (DOFs). Due to the high DOFs, the inverse kinematics of the snake robot is nonlinear and has no unique solution, which makes the motion planning quite difficult. In this paper, a serpentine curve based method is presented to simplify the motion planning process. Firstly, the configuration of the cable-driven snake robots is represented by a serpentine curve. Secondly, the serpentine curve is determined to satisfy the obstacle constraints. Finally, the robot moves along the planned curves. The serpentine curve has much less parameters than the DOFs of the robot. Letting the robot slither along the planned curves, the dimensions of motion planning can be reduced significantly. Simulations and experiments on a 25 DOFs cable-driven snake robots prototype demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented method.