Development and Control Experiment of a Snake-Like Robot with Controllable Side-Thrust Links

Abstract

This paper presents practical results of a snake-like robot with controllable side-thrust links, which is a novel snake-like robot proposed by the authors. This snake-like robot consists of multiple links connected by passive joints and each link has an active omni-directional wheel. Driving forces of the omni-directional wheels act only in the lateral directions, while the robot moves in the longitudinal direction. In this paper, the proposed snake-like robot is realized and a locomotion controller with an anti-slip controller is introduced. Development and experiment shows that the proposed snake-like robot not only looks good on paper.