A Survey on Snake Robot Locomotion

Abstract

Snake robots have been a topic of discussion among researchers for decades. They are potentially strong enough to bring substantial contributions to the fields which are unsafe/ narrow/ dirty/ hard reachable to human operators, such as inspections, rescue missions, firefighting, etc. Though the inventions of the wheel and legged mechanisms are amazing, they often fail when coming to these scenarios. Terrain adaptability is the vital essence of locomotion over constrained surfaces in biological snakes. But how this natural adaptability is accomplished in snake-like robots? Therefore, this paper focuses a study on factors behind the recreation of a physical snake, like the kinematics and dynamics modelling, mechanical design, and locomotion control approaches from existing literature. With their feature comparison, the simulators available for verifying the mathematical model and the feasibility of the mechanical design are also made for researchers new to the field.

Keywords

• Snake-robots
• locomotion control
• mathematical modelling
• kinematics
• dynamics
• mechanical design