Control and analysis of the gait of snake robots

Abstract

Snake's gait enables it to climb a hill or wind up a tree and climbing. Hirose (1987) has long investigated the motion of snakes and made several snake robots. He also showed that the trace of the snake body draws the so called "serpenoid curve". However, the control of the position of the snake head was shown to be difficult. In this paper, we show the dynamical position control of the snake robot and discuss the effect of constraining the trace of the head to a "serpenoid curve".