This paper presents the concept of teaming up snake-robots and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for autonomous navigation and obstacle avoidance of the snake robots, as an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV), in cluttered environments based on visual servoing of co-robot UAVs. The co-robot team of UGV-UAV here is based on navigation of one snake-robot and one UAV for the proof of concept. It is assumed that the snake-robot does not have any means to map the surrounding environment, detect obstacles, or self-localize and these tasks are allocated to the UAV, which can surveillance the environment, take images, and track the snake-robot. The images were used for the geo-localization and mapping the environment. Computer vision methods were utilized for the detection of  obstacles. When a frame is acquired, first, obstacle clusters are found, then, this information is sent to Probabilistic Threat Exposure Map (PTEM) construction subsystem. Then, the path planner module determines the heading direction and velocity of the snake robot.  A combined heading-velocity control was used for the snake robot to follow the desired trajectories using the lateral undulatory gait. A series of simulations were carried out for analyzing the snake maneuverability and showing the proof-of-concept by navigating the snake robot from the starting point to the target point in an environment with two obstacles based on UAV visual servoing (images). The results showed the feasibility of the proposed concept and effectiveness of the integrated system for navigation.


Navigation and Obstacle Avoidance of Snake-Robot Guided by a Co-Robot Uav Visual Servoing

Division / Sponsors: 
Dynamic Systems & Control (DSCD)

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/DSCC/DSCC2020/volume/84270

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