Soft Continuum Snake Robots

Continuum manipulators naturally are snake-like. In this research, a continuum manipulator is considered as a snake robot and dynamically simulated. With modifications as simple as detaching from a fixed position and placing on a floor, a continuum manipulator can behave as a snake robot. With their organic looking sinuous bending, they are highly capable of generating many snake locomotion gaits such as concertina and side-winding motion. The motion of continuum manipulators has been studied in detail over the years. The main limitation to those research is the lack of contact models. It is paramount to have a good contact dynamic model if one were to model the snake locomotion for continuum robots. In this research, they develop a spatial contact dynamic model to simulate the locomotion of continuum snakes.

 

Research Member: Isuru Godage