抄録
Most of snake-like robots adopt serpentine locomotion featured with smoothness and validity. But, the motion efficiency of the robot is far away from the one of the nature snake partially because of the mechanism and material differences. This paper represents that the slippage is one of the important reasons leading to low motion efficiency. To solve this problem, the passive wheel axis is suggested to be along with the normal of the serpentine curve during locomotion, which is determined by the discrete method of serpentine curve. Based on the analysis to the current discrete methods, a new control model using variable link length is proposed to improve the discrete precision. The control input of joint and link length are described. The influence of link length on the control input is also presented. This work lays a foundation to the development of new snake-like robot with the changeable link length.
