A 'sidewinding' locomotion gait for hyper-redundant robots

This paper considers a novel form of hyper-redundant mobile robot locomotion which is analogous to the 'sidewinding' locomotion gait employed by several species of snake. It is shown that this gait can be generated by a repetitive traveling wave of mechanism deformation. This paper considers primarily the kinematics of the sidewinding gait. The kinematic analysis is based on a continuous 'backbone curve' model which captures the robot's important macroscopic features. Using this continuous model, we first develop algorithms which enable travel in a uniform direction. We subsequently extend this basic gait pattern to enable changes in the direction of travel.