Environmental adaptive control of a snake-like robot with variable stiffness actuators

This work investigates adaptive stiffness control and motion optimization of a snake-like robot with variable stiffness actuators. The robot can vary its stiffness by controlling magnetorheological fluid (MRF) around actuators. In order to improve the robot's physical stability in complex environments, this work proposes an adaptive stiffness control strategy. This strategy is also useful for the robot to avoid disturbing caused by emergency situations such as collisions. In addition, to obtain optimal stiffness and reduce energy consumption, both torques of actuators and stiffness of the MRF braker are considered and optimized by using an evolutionary optimization algorithm. Simulations and experiments are conducted to verify the proposed adaptive stiffness control and optimization methods for a variable stiffness snake-like robots.