Bidirection modeling and experimental analysis of underwater snake robot

Abstract

Snakes have dedicate body and can maneuver in challenging environments. In this work, a soft snake-like robot is designed to locomote like a biological snake that can be used in search and rescue operation. The soft snake-like for underwater use has advantages of low inertia, high buoyancy, and more structural flexibility. Currently, the use of multi-redundant thin McKibben actuators for soft snake-like robot was not yet explored. Addressing this gap, a soft snake robot model using Finite Element (FE) will be developed. The FE model will be developed and used to investigate the snake bending motions in Matlab Simulink with Simscape Multibody Library (SML). Next, the actual fabrication of the robot will be validated with the simulated FE model using redundant mechanism of 10 McKibben actuators attached on a plastic plate. The structure of this robot uses 32 cm of a thin non-rigid plastic plate with five thin muscles at both sides of the body. Each thin muscle has 2.0 mm outer diameter with internal 1.3 mm silicone tube. The manipulator will be tested with different pressure and frequencies to perform various bending motions. Tracker application will capture every phase of the bending body and movements for analysis of the robot’s movement. It is expected that the snake-like robot can move and the errors of bending angle between simulation and experiment are less than 5%.