Loco-Manipulation with Nonimpulsive Contact-Implicit Planning in a Slithering Robot

Abstract-- Object manipulation has been extensively studied in the context of fixed base and mobile manipulators. However, the overactuated locomotion modality employed by snake robots allows for a unique blend of object manipulation through locomotion, referred to as loco-manipulation. The following work presents an optimization approach to solving the locomanipulation problem based on non-impulsive implicit contact path planning for our snake robot COBRA. We present the mathematical framework and show high-fidelity simulation results and experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. These approaches have found widespread application across various locomotion modalities, such as legged and slithering locomotion, showcasing remarkable adopt the concertina gait, outlined in [28], characterized efficacy, including rapid contact planning in terrestrial environments by coiling and uncoiling actions to progress longitudinally.