Experimental investigation of a path following controller for planar snake robots

Abstract

This paper considers path following control of snake robots along straight paths. A controller is proposed which, under the assumption that the forward velocity of the snake robot is nonzero and positive, guarantees K-exponential stability of the distance between the snake robot and the desired path and also K-exponential stability of the heading of the robot with respect to the direction of the path. The performance of the path following controller is investigated through experiments with a physical snake robot. The experiments show that the proposed controller successfully steers the snake robot towards and along the desired straight path.