A geometrical approach to the trajectory planning of a snake-like mechanism

The hyper-redundancy concept and related mechanisms are of special interest in robotics research. Trajectory planning and obstacle avoidance seem to be the main research areas where the use of hyper-redundancy is considered. However, there are few prototypes of this kind of robots. The present work is the introductory part of a larger study aiming at the construction of a hyper-redundant, snake-like robot supposed to progress as a real snake, without limbs or wheels. It represents a first approach to a simulation of a snake-like mechanism in order to get basic characteristics of a such locomotion