However, for ordinary robots, the complex truss structure of high-altitude cables is difficult to make them work normally. Snake-shaped robot benefits from its long and narrow body mechanism and various motion forms, and has good applicability to structures that need climbing operations.
The research team led by Professor Tang Chaoquan of China University of Mining and Technology has developed a snake-shaped robot to replace manual inspection of overhead cables. The snake-like robot consists of nine identical joints, a module with integrated control system and power supply, and a sensor in the head. The rotation between joints can be completed in a single axis of 180 degrees, and two adjacent axes are orthogonal, so it can be inserted in complex environment. On the smooth surface, the robot can complete the movement by rotating each joint and winding the body into a circle.
In order to make the snake robot have some autonomy, the robot is equipped with a wealth of sensors. Robots need to estimate their own state effectively by using the information of inertial sensors, so the attitude control and attitude calculation of each joint become the key to robot design.
Therefore, China University of Mining and Technology uses the Nuokov (metric) optical three-dimensional motion capture system to capture the joint motion of the robot. In this system, eight MAR2SH infrared optical motion capture lenses are used to capture the landmark points fixed on each joint of the snake-shaped robot, so as to obtain the position coordinates and angle changes of each joint during the movement of the snake-shaped robot as reference quantities. The effectiveness of the algorithm is verified by comparing the pose calculated by inertial sensor information fusion with the pose data obtained by motion capture system.