Real-Time Joystick-based Kinematics Control of a Snake-like Robot with Robustness Near Singular Configurations

We propose algorithms for controlling an articulated snake-like robot using a 2-axis joystick. The key contributions of the paper are two-fold: i. Development of a pipeline for converting the joystick inputs into Cartesian velocity commands for the robot’s end-effector in a way that is intuitive to a user, and, ii. Development of an optimization-based controller that generates the necessary joint velocities to track the target Cartesian velocities as closely as possible even at or near singular configurations of the robot. We describe the proposed framework and outline its technical/mathematical details. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach through Gazebo simulations as well as real-robot experiments using a prototype of a snake-like robot called FLX BOT.