KAIRO 3: Moving over stairs & unknown obstacles with reconfigurable snake-like robots

We present a planning approach for complex motions of reconfigurable snake-like robots to overcome challenging obstacles like stairs or large steps. The current robot configuration as well as different optimization criteria like distance, time or energy, are taken into account. The planning time remains unaffected by the amount of robot modules by combining the planning method with a follow-the-leader control approach. Implementation details on the developed method are presented and extensively evaluated with the reconfigurable snake-like inspection robot KAIRO 3 in three different scenarios. Our results show that the approach enables snake-like robots to overcome previously unknown obstacles according to their robot configuration.