Development and experiment of a snake-like robot composed of modularized isomorphic joints

Abstract

A snake-like robot is a hyper-redundant robot. It has flexible movement ability and high stability with low center of gravity. It is very suitable for environment detection in the rugged road or narrow space. This paper develops a snake-like robot with 10 degrees of freedoms (DOFs). Its joints are arranged as the structure of “Roll-Pitch-Roll-Pitch-....”, where “Roll” and “Pitch” respectively denote a Roll and Pitch joint. Each joint is designed as the same modularized unit, which can be used as a “Roll” or “Pitch” joint. Such design decreases the cost of development and enhances the flexibility of applications. Furthermore, the kinematics equation of this robot is derived and the movement ability is analyzed. Inspired by the biological behavior of a real snake, we plan several typical gaits for the snake-like robot, including peristalsis, rolling and Serpenoid curve gaits. We also develop the embedded controller based on the ARM processor and uc/os-ii real-time operation system. The gait planning algorithms are programmed using C language and realized in the embedded processor. At last, typical cases are experimented. The experiment results show that the developed robot has high mobility and flexibility.