Loco-manipulation with non-impulsive contact-implicit planning in a slithering robot

Abstract

Object manipulation has been extensively studied in the context of fixed base and mobilemanipulators. However, the overactuated locomotion modality employed by snake robots allows for a unique blend of object manipulation through locomotion, referred to as loco-manipulation. The following work presents an optimization approach to solving the loco-manipulation problem based on non-impulsive implicit contact path planning for our snake robot COBRA. This thesis presents the mathematical framework and show high-fidelity simulation results and experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.--Author's abstract