A follow-the-leader approach to serpentine robot motion planning

Serpentine robots offer advantages over traditional mobile robots and robot arms because they have enhanced flexibility 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 offer 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 offers advantages over previous work with serpentine robots because it provides a general mathematical structure that is not mechanism specific, thereby having applications to a large class of problems.