An experimental hyper redundant serpentine robot

Abstract

Terrestrial locomotion can be broadly classified into three categories based on their mechanism e.g. wheeled, legged and limbless locomotion. Most fascinating of these are the limbless locomotion of a serpent. Wheeled locomotion and legged locomotion have already been studied by many researchers in detail. On the contrary the limbless locomotion has drawn very limited degree of interest. In limbless locomotion (of a serpent) the cyclic changes in the body shape allow it to locomote. This paper considers the development of a hyper redundant untethered serpentine robot for implementation of various serpentine and non serpentine gaits. As such, the design of any serpentine robot is rather complex and its design depends on mechanism of implementation of gaits. Here a hyper redundant serpentine robot with eight rigid segments connected to the adjacent one using rotary actuators is discussed. The main characteristics of this design are light weight, modular in configuration with low overall density to allow the system to exhibit swimming gaits. This paper is organized in the following manner. A survey on design philosophy as adopted by earlier researchers has been discussed in Section-I. Design aspects of the serpentine robot have been discussed in Section-II. The system architecture is discussed in Section-III, whereas Section IV, V and VI respectively describes modeling, gate implementation and concluding remarks.