Turning and side motion of snake-like robot

With high adaptability to environments snakelike robots offer a variety of advantages over other mobile robots. Such a robot with passive wheels has quite different mechanism in locomotion from that of other locomotion systems. We have developed a snakelike robot for rescue applications. The unit composing the snakelike robot of Shenyang Institute of Automation (SIA) is a module including actuating system and control system. To let the snakelike robot perform turning motion and compensate offset and orientation errors of the robot, we propose an amplitude modulation method and a phase modulation method based on analysis of the serpenoid curve. The side motion of the snakelike robot can also be generated by the amplitude modulation. The tracking control method is also proposed based on sensor information. Computer simulations and experimental tests are performed to show the validity of the proposed methods.