3-D grasping during serpentine motion with a snake-like robot

Difficulties of manipulating objects in complex environments have prompted researchers to explore increasingly sophisticated manipulator designs to improve grasping and object manipulation. Grasping while locomotion has been a critical need in Search and Rescue (SAR) robot missions to enlarge passages around victims, or for any need of passing through during pure navigation or transportation. Hyper-redundant robots analogous in morphology to snakes, tentacles and elephant trunks have found wide usage as SAR robotic devices which need not only be able to pass through narrow passages but also may need to enlarge a pathway, to bring back a sample, or transport vital support to a victim. Such a device should not have a sharp saliency which is violated when equipped with manipulators that mean more probability of getting stuck among rubbles. Therefore, we focused on a snake-like robot being able to perform lasso-type grasping by some of its link while it undergoes serpentine locomotion using the others. This paper develops the 3-D grasping model and provide demonstrative examples on a 15-DOF snake simulation.