Any Curve Path Following of Snakelike Robots Because of redundant freedoms, designing a robust any path following controller for snakelike robots is very challenging. In this paper, a novel path following controller, combining the robust following controller used in the unicycle robot and the fiber bundle model of snakelike robots, is proposed to follow any planar curve. More specifically, firstly, the kinematic model is established based on the fiber bundle theory which connects snakelike robots and unicycle robots. Then the robust path following controller for the unicycle robots is modified to be applied to the sakelike robots. Finally, to obtain a feasible controller, an estimation method for the orientation angle of the robot in the fiber bundle is proposed. To validate the proposed method, numerical simulations and experiments are performed. The results demonstrate that the proposed following controller is robust and valid.

Dynamic Control of Soft Robots with Internal Constraints in the Presence of Obstacles The development of effective reduced order models for soft robots is paving the way toward the development of a new generation of model based techniques, which leverage classic rigid robot control. However, several soft robot features differentiate the softbodied case from the rigidbodied one. First, soft robots are built to work in the environment, so the presence of obstacles in their path should always be explicitly accounted by their control systems. Second, due to the complex kinematics, the actuation of soft robots is mapped to the state space nonlinearly resulting in spaces with different sizes. Moreover, soft robots often include internal constraints and thus actuation is typically limited in the range of action and it is often unidirectional. This paper proposes a control pipeline to tackle the challenge of controlling soft robots with internal constraints in environments with obstacles. We show how the constraints on actuation can be propagated and integrated with geometrical constraints, taking into account physical limits imposed by the presence of obstacles. We present a hierarchical control architecture capable of handling these constraints, with which we are able to regulate the position in space of the tip of a soft robot with the discussed characteristics.