Adaptive robust control for planar snake robots (Q2146113)

This monograph is devoted to study and design of planar robots mimicking the movements of snakes. Such kind of biological inspired robots are very interesting for science. Also they find important applications such as: inspection of industrial pipes and channels, performing dangerous tasks in hard-to-reach locations, etc. The complicated structure of the equations of motion for a snake robot moving on a planar surface makes the control problem challenging. Additionally, controlling snake robot is complicated by variable environment with uncertainty and disturbances causing variations in system parameters. To achieve efficient head-angle and velocity tracking with least computational complexity is a difficult problem. The aim of the book is to present efficient adaptive robust controlling method of snake robots. The book is divided into seven chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the state-of-art in the field of snake robotics, especially for dynamic modeling and the employed control methodologies. The following topics are presented: kinematics and dynamics of a snake robot, Euler-Lagrange equations, virtual holomonic constraint (VHC), body-shape control, serpenoid gait function, head-angle control, velocity control, robustness and multi-layered control. Chapters 2--5 present the following major research results: \begin{itemize} \item[1.] A sliding-mode control (SMC) used for efficient tracking of a planar snake robot moving in variable environment with bounded uncertainties. \item[2.] A time-delayed control (TDC) using an artificial delayed-based estimation to obtain satisfactory tracking efficiency of planar snake robots. \item[3.] An adaptive robust-time-delayed control (ARTDC) used to achieve improved tracking performance in presence of bounded estimation error. \item[4.] Differential flatness used to establish mapping between the output and input variables based on the serpenoid gait function. Flatness reduces order of systems that simplifies feedback controller design. \item[5.] The dynamic equations, obtained via Newton-Euler approach, to describe a snake robot's motion inside a channel. \end{itemize} Every chapter describes assumptions related to the considered model, description of control method used, stability analysis, plots presenting simulation results and detailed discussion. Summing up, the book reports the recent progress in methods used to control planar snake robots, achieved by the authors. The book is well--written. It can be recommended to researchers, engineers and graduate students who are interested in robotics, automatic control, optimal control problems and their effective solutions.