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Confined spaces path following for cable-driven snake robots with prediction lookup and interpolation algorithms

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Abstract

While cable-driven snake robots are promising in exploring confined spaces, their hyper-redundancy makes the collision-free motion planning difficult. In this paper, by combining the prediction lookup and interpolation algorithms, we present a new path following method for cable-driven snake robots to high-efficiently slither into complex terrains along a desired path. In our method, we first discretize the desired path into points, and develop the prediction lookup algorithm to efficiently find the points matched with joints of the robot. According to geometric relations between the prediction lookup results and link length of the robot, we develop the interpolation algorithm to reduce the tracking errors caused by the discretization. Finally, simulations and experiments of inspections in two confined spaces including the obstacle array and pipe tank system are performed on our custom-built 25 degree of freedoms (DOFs) cable-driven snake robot. The results demonstrate that the presented method can successfully navigate our snake robot into confined spaces with high computational efficiency and good accuracy, which well verifies effectiveness of our development.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Robotics Institute, School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China

    Lei Tang, LiMin Zhu, XiangYang Zhu & GuoYing Gu

  2. State Key Laboratory of Mechanical System and Vibration, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China

    Lei Tang, LiMin Zhu, XiangYang Zhu & GuoYing Gu

Authors
  1. Lei Tang
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  2. LiMin Zhu
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  3. XiangYang Zhu
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  4. GuoYing Gu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to GuoYing Gu.

Additional information

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 51435010, and 91848204).

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Supplementary material, approximately 157 MB.

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Tang, L., Zhu, L., Zhu, X. et al. Confined spaces path following for cable-driven snake robots with prediction lookup and interpolation algorithms. Sci. China Technol. Sci. 63, 255–264 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11431-019-1440-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11431-019-1440-2

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