Autonomous Obstacle Avoidance for a Snake Robot with Surface Pressure Sensing

Abstract

A sixteen-joint snake robot with full-body surface pressure sensing capabilities has been developed. A total of 64 thin film pressure sensors are evenly distributed on the surface of the robot. Four intelligent obstacle avoidance movements integrating surface pressure perception were investigated. They are as follows: the roll-over obstacle avoidance motion capable of autonomously switching between the regular rolling gait and the hump rolling gait, the autonomous crawling obstacle avoidance motion under unknown obstacle parameters, the intelligent winding and climbing motion on horizontal pipes with either unknown diameters or those with variable diameters, and the gap-crossing motion that can autonomously detect the gap position and cross over horizontal pipes with gaps. Finally, experiments were conducted in different scenarios to verify the feasibility of these four intelligent motions.