Biologically Inspired Swimming Snake Robots : Modeling , Control and Experimental Investigation

Increasing efficiency by improving locomotion methods is a key issue for underwater robots. Moreover, a number of different control design challenges must be solved in order to realize operational swimming robots for underwater tasks. This paper proposes and experimentally validates a straight line path following controller for biologically inspired swimming snake robots. In particular, a line-of-sight (LOS) guidance law is presented, which is combined with a sinusoidal gait pattern and a directional controller that steers the robot towards and along the desired path. The performance of the path following controller is investigated through experiments with a physical underwater snake robot for both lateral undulation and eel-like motion. In addition, fluid parameter identification is performed and simulation results based on the identified fluid coefficients are presented to obtain back-to-back comparison with the motion of the physical robot during the experiments. The experimental results show that the proposed control strategy successfully steers the robot towards and along the desired path for both lateral undulation and eel-like motion patterns.

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