Dynamic analysis of 3-dimensional snake robots

Abstract

Snake-like robots that behaves biological snakes' characteristics have possibility to make them supremely adapted for environment. In this paper, we firstly formulate the kinematics and the dynamics of 3-dimensional snake robots and then analyze the sinus-lifting creeping motion as an example. In this study, the sinus-lifting motion was imaged as the creeping motion in 2-dimensional plane with different distribution of normal reaction forces for simplicity. Comparison has been made between the creeping locomotion with uniform normal reaction forces, and the sinus-lifting creeping motion where the normal reaction forces are distributed by the weight with respect to the body curvature. As a result, we know that the snake-like robot in the sinus-lifting creeping motion mode with curvature-weighted normal reaction forces moves at higher speed than that in the creeping motion mode with uniform normal reaction forces.