Along with the advancement of robot skin technology, there has been notable progress in the development of snake robots featuring body-surface tactile perception. In this study, we proposed a locomotion control framework for snake robots that integrates tactile perception to augment their adaptability to various terrains. Our approach embraces a hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) architecture, wherein the high-level orchestrates global navigation strategies while the low-level uses curriculum learning for local navigation maneuvers. Due to the significant computational demands of collision detection in whole-body tactile sensing, the efficiency of the simulator is severely compromised. Thus a distributed training pattern to mitigate the efficiency reduction was adopted. We evaluated the navigation performance of the snake robot in complex large-scale cave exploration with challenging terrains to exhibit improvements in motion efficiency, evidencing the efficacy of tactile perception in terrain-adaptive locomotion of snake robots.
Snakes can traverse almost all types of environments by bending their elongate bodies in 3-D to interact with the terrain. Similarly, a snake robot is a promising platform to perform critical tasks in various environments. Understanding how 3-D body bending effectively interacts with the terrain for propulsion and stability can not only inform how snakes traverse natural environments, but also allow snake robots to achieve similar performance. How snakes and snake robots move on flat surfaces has been understood well. However, such ideal terrain is rare in natural environments and little was u…
Snake robots have the potential to maneuver through tightly packed and complex environments. One challenge in enabling them to do so is the complexity in determining how to coordinate their many degrees-of-freedom to create purposeful motion. This is especially true in the types of terrains considered in this work: environments full of unmodeled features that even the best of maps would not capture, motivating us to develop closed-loop controls to react to those features. To accomplish this, this work uses proprioceptive sensing, mainly the force information measured by the snake robot's joint…
University of California San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Technion – Israel Institute of Technology（以色列理工学院）
Exploring and navigating in extreme environments, such as caves, oceans, and planetary bodies, are often too hazardous for humans, and as such, robots are possible surrogates. These robots are met with significant locomotion challenges that require traversing a wide range of surface roughnesses and topologies. Previous locomotion strategies, involving wheels or ambulatory motion, such as snake platforms, have success on specific surfaces but fail in others which could be detrimental in exploration and navigation missions. In this paper, we present a novel approach that combines snake-like robo…
Learning, locomotion, and navigation of soft synthetic snakes in three-dimensional, heterogeneous environments
Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign（卡尔·R·沃塞基因组生物学研究所，伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科学与技术大学机械与航空航天工程系）；Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校机械科学与工程系）
ARCSnake V2: Mechanical Adaptations For An Amphibious Multi-Domain Screw-Propelled Snake-Like Robot
Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department, University of California San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校机械与航空航天工程系）；Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of California, San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校电气与计算机工程系）
Collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Systems (CoRIS) Institute, Oregon State University（俄勒冈州立大学协作机器人与智能系统（CoRIS）研究所）；Bard College at Simon’s Rock（巴德学院西蒙洛克分校）；Olin College of Engineering（奥林工程学院）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
Snake robots are characterized by their ability to navigate through small spaces and loose terrain by utilizing efficient cyclic forms of locomotion. Soft snake robots are a subset of these robots which utilize soft, compliant actuators to produce movement. Prior work on soft snake robots has primarily focused on planar gaits, such as undulation. More efficient spatial gaits, such as sidewinding, are unexplored gaits for soft snake robots. We propose a novel means of constructing a soft snake robot capable of sidewinding, and introduce the Helical Inflating Soft Snake Robot (HISSbot). We valid…
EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Future Autonomous and Robotic Systems (FARSCOPE) at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory（布里斯托机器人实验室未来自主与机器人系统博士培训中心）；Dept. of Engineering Maths and Bristol Robotics Laboratory, University of Bristol（布里斯托大学工程数学系与布里斯托机器人实验室）；Dept. of Engineering Maths, University of Bristol（布里斯托大学工程数学系）
Little research into tactile feet has been done for walking robots despite the benefits such feedback could give when walking on uneven terrain. This paper describes the development of a simple, robust and inexpensive tactile foot for legged robots based on a high-resolution biomimetic TacTip tactile sensor. Several design improvements were made to facilitate tactile sensing while walking, including the use of phosphorescent markers to remove the need for internal LED lighting. The usefulness of the foot is verified on a quadrupedal robot performing a beam walking task and it is found the sens…
Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology（维斯瓦瓦拉亚国家理工学院）；NASA-JPL, Caltech（加州理工学院NASA喷气推进实验室）
The selection of mobility modes for robot navigation consists of various trade-offs. Snake robots are ideal for traversing through constrained environments such as pipes, cluttered and rough terrain, whereas bipedal robots are more suited for structured environments such as stairs. Finally, quadruped robots are more stable than bipeds and can carry larger payloads than snakes and bipeds but struggle to navigate soft soil, sand, ice, and constrained environments. A reconfigurable robot can achieve the best of all worlds. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art reconfigurable robots rely on the rearrang…
Tightly-Coupled LiDAR-IMU-Leg Odometry with Online Learned Leg Kinematics Incorporating Foot Tactile Information
Space Robotics Lab., Dept. Aerospace Eng., Tohoku University, Japan（东京东京大学航空航天工程系空间机器人实验室，日本）；Dept. of Information Technology and Human Factors, the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Japan（日本国家先进工业科学和技术研究院信息科技与人因系）
The ability to perform locomotion in various terrains is critical for legged robots. However, the robot has to have a better understanding of the surface it is walking on to perform robust locomotion on different terrains. Animals and humans are able to recognize the surface with the help of the tactile sensation on their feet. Although, the foot tactile sensation for legged robots has not been much explored. This paper presents research on a novel quadruped robot DogTouch with tactile sensing feet (TSF). TSF allows the recognition of different surface textures utilizing a tactile sensor and a…
University of California San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory（美国国家航空航天局喷气推进实验室）
This paper presents the design and performance of a screw-propelled redundant serpentine robot. This robot comprises serially linked, identical modules, each incorporating an Archimedes' screw for propulsion and a universal joint (U-Joint) for orientation control. When serially chained, these modules form a versatile snake robot platform which enables the robot to reshape its body configuration for varying environments and gait patterns that would be typical of snake movement. Furthermore, the Archimedes' screws allow for novel omni-wheel drive-like motions by speed controlling their screw thr…
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Tactile sensing on human feet is crucial for motion control, however, has not been explored in robotic counterparts. This work is dedicated to endowing tactile sensing to legged robot's feet and showing that a single-legged robot can be stabilized with only tactile sensing signals from its foot. We propose a robot leg with a novel vision-based tactile sensing foot system and implement a processing algorithm to extract contact information for feedback control in stabilizing tasks. A pipeline to convert images of the foot skin into high-level contact information using a deep learning framework i…
Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IDSIA), USI-SUPSI（达勒·莫勒人工智能研究所（IDSIA），瑞士意大利语区大学-南方应用科技大学）
Mobile ground robots operating on unstructured terrain must predict which areas of the environment they are able to pass in order to plan feasible paths. We address traversability estimation as a heightmap classification problem: we build a convolutional neural network that, given an image representing the heightmap of a terrain patch, predicts whether the robot will be able to traverse such patch from left to right. The classifier is trained for a specific robot model (wheeled, tracked, legged, snake-like) using simulation data on procedurally generated training terrains; the trained classifi…
Tactile sensing enables vertical obstacle negotiation for elongate many-legged robots
Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines（机器人与智能机器研究所）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；School of Physics（物理系）；School of Mechanical Engineering（机械工程系）；College of Computing（计算学院）
Robots "in-the-wild" encounter and must traverse widely varying terrain, ranging from solid ground to granular materials like sand to full liquids. Numerous approaches exist, including wheeled and legged robots, each excelling in specific domains. Screw-based locomotion is a promising approach for multi-domain mobility, leveraged in exploratory robotic designs, including amphibious vehicles and snake robotics. However, unlike other forms of locomotion, there is a limited exploration of the models, parameter effects, and efficiency for multi-terrain Archimedes screw locomotion. In this work, we…
