Animals have traditionally served as a significant source of motivation for the development of robotic systems. This is due to the fact that animals provide intriguing natural examples of how various structures of the body can produce distinct movements and types of locomotion. Although the vast majority of animal-inspired robots are modeled after species of animals that walk on all fours, some roboticists are investigating the viability of creating robots with bodies that mimic those of other creatures, such as snakes.

Robots modeled after snakes have several distinctive qualities that differentiate them from other types of robots and may make them better suited for certain technical applications. For instance, their ability to move in a flexible and serpentine fashion could make them useful in order to carry out endoscopic procedures and surgeries requiring a minimal amount of incision. These procedures involve entering the body of a patient through the nose in order to reach the desired locations elsewhere in the body.

In spite of the many benefits they offer, the methods that are now available to control these robots from a distance are not very efficient. Although Robots with a snakelike design are redundant to a fault, which means that they have a high or limitless variety of possible combinations and permutations, the electronic devices that are used to control their motions often only allow users to select six degrees of freedom. This is the primary reason why this is the case.

Recently, a group of investigators working out of the Leibniz University in Hannover came up with a novel method for intuitively and remotely controlling the actions of a hyper-redundant swarm of snake robots. This was done in order to circumvent the constraint that was previously mentioned. This method, which was presented in a paper that was pre-published on arXiv, gives users the ability to modify the orientation and movement of a robot that resembles a snake while preserving its shape to the greatest extent possible.

In their publication, Tim-Lukas Habich and coworkers introduce SnakeTTP, an algorithm that allows for intuitive telemanipulation, allowing for both mobility and pivot reorientation, in the context of endoscopic activities. The novel approach is Using inverse kinematics with a focus on priority tasks, which allows for flexible prioritization of orientation and position specifications and null space form fitting. While concurrently defining the end effector’s position and orientation, shape fitting is achieved by optimizing the Frechet distance between two curves.

When assessing the efficacy of the SnakeTTP algorithm developed by Habich and his colleagues, they had 14 people guide a virtual snake robot to a predetermined location. Very encouragingly, Users navigating the simulated robotic snake were able to not only effectively accomplish the locomotion challenge but also re-orient the robot’s movements inside a target area with minimal changes to its shape.

According to what Habich and his colleagues noted in their work, ” As a comparison to the traditional method of form-fitting that uses the Euclidean distance to determine the gap between the present and desired link positions, the innovative shape-fitting methodology that uses the Frechet distance can minimize shape inaccuracy by up to 20.1%.”

Although a brand-new algorithm for regulation that was developed by this group of researchers has shown some promise in its early testing, the real-world applications of this technology have not yet been examined. Its efficacy may be further validated by subsequent testing carried out in conditions more representative of the real world and utilizing actual snake robots.

In the end, the method could give researchers the ability to control snake robots and other hyper-redundant robots such as robots with better precision that are inspired by the tentacles of the octopus., while also allowing them to better replicate movements similar to those of snakes or tentacles. This, in turn, could make the use of these robots in medical settings easier, particularly when it comes to carrying out inside-the-body surgical practices that involve only a small amount of cutting and stitching.