Abstract
Snakes possess multi-locomotion abilities to best suit different environments. This work explores the design of a robot to replicate three types of snake motions: rectilinear, serpentine and sidewinding. The design featured identical modular housing units containing all the components for movement, a biomimetic skin to replicate the anisotropic friction created by the scales of the snakeskin and smart servos motors that produce adjacent housing rotation to imitate the body motion of a snake. Two prototypes are manufactured using rapid prototyping. Prototype 1 is designed to replicate rectilinear motion produced by the biomimetic snakeskin and collinear movement of each housing. Prototype 2 is powered by the smart servos and the rotation of adjacent housings to produce serpentine and sidewinding motions. From initial tests, prototype 1 is shown to be able to replicate rectilinear motion at low speeds, and prototype 2 is shown to be able to undertake 6 different movement options utilising both sidewinding and serpentine motions.
J. M. Frampton, S. Djoudi, A. Murphy, T. Scammel and T. Wright—Contributed equally.
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Frampton, J.M., Djoudi, S., Murphy, A., Scammell, T., Wright, T., Ji, Z. (2021). Designing a Multi-locomotion Modular Snake Robot. In: Fox, C., Gao, J., Ghalamzan Esfahani, A., Saaj, M., Hanheide, M., Parsons, S. (eds) Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems. TAROS 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13054. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89177-0_26
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89177-0_26
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