Unified Approach to the Motion Design for a Snake Robot Negotiating Complicated Pipe Structures

A unified method for designing the motion of a snake robot negotiating complicated pipe structures is presented. Such robots moving inside pipes must deal with various “obstacles,” such as junctions, bends, diameter changes, shears, and blockages. To surmount these obstacles, we propose a method that enables the robot to adapt to multiple pipe structures in a unified way. This method also applies to motion that is necessary to pass between the inside and the outside of a pipe. We designed the target form of the snake robot using two helices connected by an arbitrary shape. This method can be applied to various obstacles by designing a part of the target form specifically for given obstacles. The robot negotiates obstacles under shift control by employing a rolling motion. Considering the slip between the robot and the pipe, the model expands the method to cover cases where two helices have different properties. We demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method in various experiments.