Dynamics and Control of Snake Robot in Uncertain Underwater Environment

Abstract

In recent years, researchers are interested in understanding living creatures and replicating their movement, structure, and cognition to develop biomimetic robots. Extracting these features, the biomimetic robots are developed for suitable environmental conditions and their applications. The snake is a versatile creature that can be found on land and in water environments with similar motion. Therefore, the mimicking of a snake can be used for wide applications in both environments. The motion of a snake is very sensitive to environmental conditions because of its crawling nature and that makes it a challenging problem to understand dynamics and control perspectives in a robotic system. The snake robot consists of the multi-links and joints that make it a complex mechanical system and controlling this system in an adaptive environment is a challenge. Therefore, the design of an appropriate control scheme for the complex dynamical system and modification in the mechanical system (that leads to dynamics) to get more suitable solutions become important. The main objective of the present work is to study the motion dynamics and design of a control scheme for a snake robot in uncertain underwater environment. Hence, it is proposed to study the motion dynamics of a snake robot and its control strategies in uncertain underwater conditions. The snake robot, consisting of 9 links and 8 joints, is considered under the assumption of planar motion with negligible added mass effect.