ANALYSIS OF JOINT FAILURES ON THE LATERAL UNDULATION GAIT OF A ROBOTIC SNAKE

Abstract

This paper describes the development of a biologically-inspired hyper-redundant wheeled snake robot and a corresponding computer simulator to study the effects that joint failures have on the resulting lateral undulation motion. Experiments and corresponding simulations were carried out to study the robotic snake’s lateral undulation gait as power to individual joints was turned off. The results showed that joint failures were most detrimental to the snake’s lateral undulation gait when they occurred in the front half of the snake, while joint failures occurring between the midpoint and tail of the robotic snake were found to be less critical and generally resulted in slight lateral drifts as the forward motion progressed. To help compensate for joint failures in the tail-half part of the robot, a bias term was added to the control algorithm. For the conditions tested in this research, the use of a bias term appeared to be effective at reducing the lateral drift.