A Geometric Control Framework for Enabling Behavior-Based Planning and Locomotion of Undulatory Robots

配备了细长和过度驱动的身体，蛇形机器人具有在复杂环境中机动的能力。这些平台因其在瓦砾、狭窄空间和其他标准机器人难以到达的区域导航时的机车优势而受到称赞。然而，如果没有可靠的系统反馈控制框架，蛇形机器人就不能从遥操作过渡到完全自主。该奖项将支持从基本力学原理出发对蛇的运动进行动态建模的进展。这些模型对于控制机器蛇和其他波动系统很重要，并将消除自主的一个关键障碍。该奖项还将支持对鳞片在蛇运动中所起作用的基础研究，包括创造机器蛇皮，使蛇形机器人能够实现真正的蛇鳞片的运动优势。该项目的最终目标是在未知环境中演示自主蛇操作。这样做将使机器蛇更接近于可部署在危险环境中进行搜索和救援、检查和操作。这些研究成果也将适用于类似的生物启发机器人，如游泳和扑翼飞行机器人。机器人的普及将被用来创造吸引人的教育和推广活动，以促进工程数学。蛇形机器人是高维、铰接式无腿机器人，它利用对连续形态特征的控制，以各种方式实现运动。科学已经揭示了运动背后的物理原理，而工程师们已经复制了基本的机制，并可以遥控这些机器人。然而，制定可操作的反馈控制政策的问题尚未完全解决。缺少的是物理和数学公式，这些公式弥合了从实现起伏步态到沿规划路径受控执行运动的差距。为了解决这一差距，该项目将设计并展示生物启发下的机器蛇规模制造的性能优势。所设计的鳞片将再现蛇鳞片的结构和各向异性摩擦特性。此外，这项研究将使用时空平均来推导出波动机器人系统的简化控制方程，其中身体的内部自由度是在连续统中建模的。实现这两个目标将解决生物启发的起伏机器人和传统工程机器人之间的长期成就差距。

Equipped with a slender and over-actuated body, snake-like robots have the ability to maneuver through complex environments. These platforms have been heralded for their locomotive advantages when navigating through rubble, tight spaces, and other areas hard to reach with standard robots. Yet, without a reliably systematic feedback control framework, snake-like robots cannot make the transition from teleoperation to full autonomy. This award will support advances in the dynamic modeling of snake locomotion from fundamental mechanical principles. These models are important for controlling robotic snakes, and other undulatory systems, and will remove a key obstacle to autonomy. The award will also support fundamental research into the role that scales play in snake locomotion, including the creation of robotic snake skin that will enable snake-like robots to realize the locomotive advantages of actual snake scales. The end goal of the project is to demonstrate autonomous snake operation through an unknown environment. Doing so will bring robotic snakes significantly closer to being deployable for search and rescue, inspection, and operation in hazardous environments. The research findings will also apply to similar biologically-inspired robots, such as swimming and flapping-wing flying robots. The popularity of robotics will be leveraged to create engaging educational and outreach activities in promotion of engineering mathematics.Snake-like robots are high-dimensional, articulated limbless robots that exploit control over a continuous morphological feature to achieve locomotion in a variety of ways. Science has exposed the physical principles underlying locomotion, while engineers have reproduced the fundamental mechanisms and can teleoperate these robots. However the creation of actionable feedback control policies is not fully resolved. What is missing is the physical and mathematical formulation that bridges the gap from achievement of undulatory gaits to the controlled execution of motion along a planned path. To address the gap, this project will design, and demonstrate the performance benefits of, biologically inspired scale fabrication for robotic snakes. The designed scales will reproduce the structural and anistropic friction properties of snake scales. Further, the research will use spatio-temporal averaging to derive reduced control equations for undulatory robotic systems where the body's internal degrees of freedom are modeled in the continuum. Achieving these two objectives will resolve a long-standing achievement gap between biologically inspired, undulatory robots and traditionally engineered robots.