A Head Stabilizer of A Snake Robot Crawling in Serpentine Locomotion

摘要

Stabilizing the head module of snake robots is challenging, because these robots implement swinging locomotion to move. In this paper, a snake head stabilizer is designed based on Serpentine locomotion, which is similar to the head stabilizer of a real snake. In this stabilizer model, some feature points, namely inflection points, are defined on a Serpenoid curve through deriving the parametric equations of Serpenoid curve. These inflection points are proved that all of the points are on a certain circle, whose radius and position of center are determined by the parameters of Serpenoid curve. The desired direction of the snake head module can be obtained by the positional relationship between the circle center and the head joint. To verify the effect of stabilizer, simulation and experiments are conducted. The results prove that the stabilizer effectively reduces oscillation amplitudes of the head module during movement, which is worthy to be popularized in industry.