Design of a Hierarchical Control System for Tetherless Snake Robot

In this paper, a hierarchical control architecture for the tetherless snake robot is presented, which is a modular, flexible, easily expanded and highly autonomous system. The control system is divided into three layers. The human-computer interaction layer is used to detect the environment and operate the robot. The head controller layer includes a compute stick, a camera and a communication unit, which communicates with PC via Wifi. The joint layer is used for motor-driven control and data acquisition. The multisensory system and hardware architecture provide the snake robot with the ability to sense the state of itself and the environment. Finally, the platform was build to carry out experiment and several gaits were adopted to evaluate the performance of the hierarchical control system.