Bottom-up and top-down approaches to dynamics of hyper-redundant mechanical systems

We explain bottom-up and top-down approaches to dynamics of hyper-redundant mechanical systems. In the bottom-up approach we consider snake robots as a typical example of the hyper-redundant mechanical systems for extracting the fundamental property and developing the suitable model representation. We propose a control law for avoiding singularity of the snake robot using redundancy. In the top-down approaches we propose two system theoretic approaches to dynamics of hyper-redundant mechanical systems. The first one is focused on the partial periodicity property in the system. The second one is based on the distributed parameter model. We explain the interaction of both bottom-up and top-down approaches for constructing hyper-redundant mechanical systems