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Foundations of Robotics Seminar, October 6, 2010
Time
and Place | Seminar Abstract
Shape Models for Snake Robots
Dave Rollinson
Robotics Institute
CMU
NSH 1507
Talk 4:00 pm
The "Modsnakes" in Prof. Howie Choset's lab have the impressive ability locomote in unique ways, such as through pipes and up the outside of poles. To simplify the control of their 16 degrees of freedom, we use cyclic motions called gaits. These gaits typically consist of parameterized sine waves that generate commanded angles for the modules as a function of time. At the moment, virtually all of the gaits for the snakes are open-loop and unable to provide locomotion in non-trivial environments. One of the first steps towards adaptive and autonomous behavior involves tackling the problem of modeling a snake's motion through the environment.
In this talk I will introduce the idea of creating shape models for gaits as a way of separating the motion of the gait itself from the motion of snake's overall body in the world. I will present a number of shape models that have been developed for commonly used gaits like sidewinding, rolling, pole climbing, and pipe crawling. Finally, I will discuss the preliminary results of using these shape models as the motion model of an Extended Kalman Filter and discuss future plans to incorporate feedback for control, focusing particularly in the domain of pipes.
The Robotics Institute is part of the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University.