A Follow-the-Leader Approach to Serpentine Robot Motion Planning

Serpentine robots o er advantages over traditional mobile robots and robot arms because they have enhanced exibility and reachability, especially in convoluted environments. These robots are well suited to inspect large space-fairing truss structures such as the future space station and can also be used to inspect the Space Shuttle cargo bay before launch. Serpentine mechanisms o er unique capabilities on Earth to applications such as bridge inspection, search and rescue, surface coating, and minimally invasive surgery. The work, described in this paper, will exploit a geometric structure, termed a roadmap, to guide the motions of a serpentine robot in highly convoluted spaces. This approach o ers advantages over previous work with serpentine robots because it provides a general mathematical structure that is not mechanism speci c, thereby having applications to a large class of problems.