Sliding mode control of locomotion for a biomimetic robot inspired by pillbugs

Reconnaissance robots can reduce the danger of hazardous places by providing information before human personnel take action. In practice, the robot platform should be small and light. However, this fact leads to a scaling issue with terrain that poses a huge obstacle for the vehicle. The problem can be solved by the inspiration of nature. This paper presents a sliding mode control (SMC) of locomotion for a pill bug inspired robot, Pillbot. The performance of sliding mode control will be compared to that of PID through RecurDyn-Simulink cosimulation.