A Study of Active Cord Mechanisms -Biomechanical Consideration on its 3D Gaits-

Abstract

In this paper, the meaning of active cord mechanism (ACM) is expanded as follows: a mobile robot having an articulated body consisting of serially connected units for active bending and stretching. We propose ACM 3-dimensional (3D) gaits to describe ACM locomotion in 3D space. In 3D gaits, the motion of every point on the body curve is expressed by combining 3 periodic functions for position and time. We show that ACM 3D gaits uniformly express limbless locomotion in long, thin bodies of creatures such as snakes, slugs, and earthworms. We also show that it is instructive to design new types of ACM.