Design of a Climbing Snake-Like Robot with Multi-Sensor Fusion

Pipe and tree climbing capabilities are important for robots in military, agriculture and so on. However, current climbing robots are insufficient in climbing adaptability. This study designs a new climbing snake-like robot CliSR. This robot is modular, composed of three sections, namely the head, neck, and trunk. The head is equipped with a depth camera for environment detection; the neck module can keep the head stable; the trunk is used for movement. In addition, each module of trunk is equipped with the pressure sensors and gyroscope sensors to detect the robot's status. In order to improve the robot's reliability and motion capability, this robot adopts distributed control, in which the master control of the robot and the host computer communicate by WiFi, the master control communicates with each trunk control module by RS485, and each joint of the robot is controlled by the corresponding trunk control module. In order to verify this design, this study built a pipe climbing simulation environment based on Gazebo and ROS. The simulation results show that the robot is able to climb the pipe and performs well.