Contemporary research on mobile robotics aims at designing robots that will be able to traverse an extremely varied environment. One of the most universal modes of locomotion is the serpentine movement. A majority of modern snake-like robots use electric drives. This study presents a snake-like robot made out of McKibben muscles. Using a pneumatic cable with muscles arranged in series, it is possible to create a robot of any length, limited only by the length of the muscle cables. Because the control system and the body of the robot are separate, the robot can be used for rescue missions involving high risk of explosion of flammable substances and for missions taking place on extremely difficult terrain.
The issues of medical robots have been approached for 12 years in the Institute of Machine Tools and Production Engineering of the Technical University of Lodz. In the last two years, the scope of research related to the miniaturization of surgical tools, automated changing of these tools with the use of a tool depot designed for this purpose, equipping the robot in the sense of touch and developing the software which provides ergonomic and intuitive robot control with the use of all its functions. In the telemanipulator control, strong emphasis is placed on the intuitiveness of control, which is hard to be ensured due to the fact that the robot tool is observed by a laparoscopic camera, whose orientation and position may vary. That is the reason for developing a new algorithm. It copies the increments of the position and orientation measured in relation to the monitor coordinate system onto the robot tool movement and orientation, which are measured in relation to the camera coordinates system. In this algorithm it is necessary to solve inverse kinematics, which has a discontinuity. Avoiding the discontinuity is achieved by mapping the solution with the cosine function. It causes smooth pass through the area of discontinuity in this way avoiding the singularity.
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