Design And Research Of Modular Snake-like Robot

The snake-like robot redundancy is extremely high, and the snake-like robot hasthe ability to multi-DOF motion, so that it can mimic a variety of movement patterns ofbiological snakes. The snake-like robot has a good stability and a strong ability to adaptto the terrain in the process of marching and the snake-like robot has a wide foregroundof application in many fields.Currently the developed snake-like robot has a variety of structures and canachieve a variety of sports models. This design of the snake-like robot uses the modularjoint design, its overall mechanical structure is become by nine module series. Themodular joint of a snake-like robot is similar to a universal joint mechanism, with twodegrees of freedom. Each degree of freedom is driven and controlled by motor andcontrol system. Through the modular joint connection a snake-like robot can have highredundancy and achieve a variety of postures and movement modes. The snake-likerobot can increase or decrease the number of modular joints according to the differentstudies and environment, this design provides a great convenience for future researchand practical applications.The biological snake’s serpentine motion is the most typical movement, and it isthe core issue of the snake-like robot’s movement patterns. In this paper, we design amodular snake-robot for the study, research the snake-like robot’s serpentine motion,bulid the kinematic model based on the snake-like robot’s movement patterns, thenbulid a snake-like robot’s digital prototype in Recurdyn. By adding the variousconstraints and contacts in Recurdyn, setting motion function, we silumate the inpact ofthe joint angle function’s parameters to the snake-like robot’s forward speed. Finally, thesimulation results are analyzed and explained.On the basis of these studies, we processed the snake-like robot’s modular joints,build a snake-like robot physical prototype composed of nine modular joints, thenconduct a serpentine motion test. The results show that the design of the modularsnake-like robot can complete the scheduled serpentine motion.