Motion Planning for a Redundant Planar Snake Robot

Abstract

In this paper, a gait generation method for redundant under-actuated planar snake-like robots is developed. The proposed method generates gaits that guarantee achieving the desired net rotation of a floating snake-robot, that is, in the fiber space. This is done by specifying closed trajectories in the actuated base space, that is, cyclic time trajectories for all the actuated degrees of freedom. The proposed method is validated for purely mechanical systems that have a three-dimensional base space. Intuition is shed on how the proposed method could be modified to be applicable to higher-dimensional base spaces.