Conclusions

Abstract

Serpentine robots are designed to incorporate features of snake motion to achieve movement capabilities in a wide range of environment like flat surfaces, constrained spaces, underwater, etc. Execution of motion control for such robots require the tracking of the tangential velocity to a predefined reference value, whereas the rest of the generalized coordinates are required to exhibit stable limit cycle behavior. This thesis contributes toward addressing maneuvering control problem as well as dynamic modeling for snake robots. Specifically, the design of a series of robust controllers for a planar snake robot dynamics modeled with system uncertainties has been discussed. This thesis also studies differential flatness for snake robots, with the aim of facilitating an unified approach to achieve body shape, head angle and velocity control. The work in this thesis attempts to expand the work zone of a snake robot to constrained spaces like pipes and channels. A mathematical model for the motion in such an environment has been proposed with the aim of control design. The work presented in each chapter has been summarized below.