Manipulation Using a Snake Robot Based on the Head Raising Motion

The snake robot is a biologically inspired robot with hyper-redundant joints. Though the locomotion control of the robot has been widely studied for decades, there are few works about the manipulation, which is more and more important. In this paper, a two-stage manipulation method is proposed by planning head raising locomotion and controlling the head pose of the snake robot. Specifically, the whole robot is divided into the ground part and the manipulation part, where the ground part is considered as the support polygon to maintain the stability during the head raising motion, and the manipulation part is considered as the manipulator to achieve tasks. The head raising motion planning is solved by nonlinear optimization and the head pose controller is designed by inverse kinematics. Finally the proposed method is verified through simulation. Results show that the head of the snake robot can reach any desired valid pose accurately.