Machine locomotion using wheels, tracks or legs is common where as generating locomotion in a limbless, wheelless system is more challenging. 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...

Biological snakes’ diverse locomotion modes and physiology make them supremely adapted for environment. When their unique movements are broadly classified, the following four gliding modes exist: 1) Serpentine locomotion; 2) Rectilinear locomotion; 3) Concertina locomotion; 4) Side winding locomotion. However, the serpentine locomotion is the movement seen typically in almost all kinds of snake...

Snake robots are mostly designed based on single mode locomotion. However, single mode gait most likely could not work effectively when the robot is subject to an unstructured working environment with different measures of terrain complexity. As a solution, mixed mode locomotion is proposed in this paper by synchronizing two types of gaits known as serpentine and wriggler gaits used for non-con...

Robots that mimic the natural motions of animals have long been of interest in science and engineering. The primary engineering interest in such robots is in having them conduct tasks that require complicated locomotion and cognition. Designating an outdoor mobile robot is more challenging work than the indoor mobile robot because it has the capability of operation at all weather condition and ...

This paper uses geometric methods to study basic problems in the mechanics and control of locomotion. We consider in detail the case of \undulatory locomotion," in which net motion is generated by coupling internal shape changes with external nonholonomic constraints. Such locomotion problems have a natural geometric interpretation as a connection on a principal ber bundle. The properties of co...

To clarify the mechanism of multi-articular muscles that contributes to the emergence of animal behavior, we focus on the locomotion of a snake. Analyses on the basis of the continuum model show that the body propels efficiently as the number of segments spanned by each muscle increases. On the basis of this result, we propose a decentralized control scheme for the efficient locomotion of a mul...

This article presents our current work on studying energy efficient locomotion on crawling snake-like robots. The aim of this work is to use existing biological inspired methods to demonstrate lateral undulation planar gaits for efficiently controlling high-speed motion as a function of the terrain surface. A multilink non-wheeled snake-like robot is being developed for experimentation and anal...

A model for serpentine locomotion is derived from a novel perspective based on concepts from configurational mechanics. The motion is realized through the release of the elastic energy of a deformable rod, sliding inside a frictionless channel, which represents a snake moving against lateral restraints. A new formulation is presented, correcting previous results and including situations never a...