Applying snake-like robots to environmental exploration has been a hot topic for years. How to achieve free navigation for target search in a complex environment in a safe and efficient manner is one of the main tasks that researchers in the field of robotics currently face. This article presents a target exploration system that takes advantages of visual sensing to navigate the snake-like robot in structured environments. Two cameras are utilized in the system. The first one is mounted on the head of the snake-like robot for target recognition and the other is an overhead camera which is responsible for locating the robot and identifying surrounding obstacles. All dead ends in the environment can thus be recognized using a template-based method. A search strategy for traversal of the dead ends is employed for generating exploration paths. Several gaits are developed for the snake-like robot. By switching between these gaits, the snake-like robot is able to follow the paths to search for the target. Two experiments are conducted in a maze environment. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed system for snake-like robots exploring in structured environments.

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结构化环境下蛇形机器人视觉目标探测系统的开发

多年来，将蛇形机器人应用于环境探索一直是一个热门话题。如何安全高效地实现复杂环境下目标搜索的自由导航，是当前机器人领域研究人员面临的主要任务之一。本文介绍了一种目标探索系统，该系统利用视觉传感的优势在结构化环境中导航蛇形机器人。系统中使用了两个摄像头。第一个安装在蛇形机器人的头部，用于目标识别，另一个是头顶摄像头，负责定位机器人并识别周围的障碍物。因此，可以使用基于模板的方法识别环境中的所有死胡同。采用遍历死胡同的搜索策略来生成探索路径。为蛇形机器人开发了几种步态。通过在这些步态之间切换，蛇形机器人能够沿着路径搜索目标。在迷宫环境中进行了两个实验。实验结果验证了所提出的系统对于在结构化环境中探索的蛇形机器人的有效性。