A Proposal of Spiral Inchworm Gait for a Snake Robot Moving on a Cylinder

摘要

Hyper redundant snake robot systems have possibility of utilizing in many fields, although there are control complexity problems when attempting to climb obstacles. An example of the climbing obstacles by snake robot is helical rolling motion which have been used to climb a cylinder. However, helical rolling motion is not available to step over an obstacle on a cylinder such as a flange. In this paper we propose a new spiral inchworm gait, by simplifying a gait from a biological snake, which can be used to present an alternative gait to the helical rolling motion for pitch-yaw connected robotic snakes to climb obstacles. The shape of the robot under spiral inchworm motion is planned by using mathematical continuum curve model. Some experimental results are shown to verify the effectiveness of the spiral inchworm gait.