Adaptive locomotion of snake-like robots

Abstract

Adaptive locomotion for multi-robot organisms is a huge challenge in modern robotics. The complexity grows fast with the number of degrees of freedom (DOFs) of a robot. A snake like organism structure usually consists of many DOFs and is hence restricted in their motion capabilities. In this theses, an adaptive gait algorithm for avoiding of obstacles should be analyzed by using techniques of coupled oscillators. The simulation in MATLAB as well as tests on a real snake robot will be done in this work. In the MATLAB simulation we could see the principle of adaptive snake-like locomotion as it should be. As well we could analyse fitting functions for the oszillator in the Central Pattern Generator. On the real snake robot we had to take the theoretical foundations and adapt them to make them work on real-time operating system. It was faszinating to work on all difficulties be communication, configuration, designing or programming. And finally we saw the robot crawl arround obstacles, controlled by the equations we developed. It would be great to see our work live on in projects like SYMBRION and REPLICATOR.