抄録
This paper is concerned with a new approach to the locomotion control of the trident snake robot, focusing on its double-linked case where the robot is composed of a triangular body and three branches of double-linked snake-like legs. Originally, this robot was proposed by the authors as a novel example of nonholonomic mobile robot. The well-known Lie Algebra Rank Condition (LARC) for its nonlinear controllability has an odd structure that it contains two generator vector-fields and higher order Lie brackets, which makes its control problem extremely challenging. In this paper, for this difficult control problem, we first propose a design algorithm which partially achieves the desired locomotion. Then we point out that the resulting motion may or may not be a stable limit cycle, depending on the eigenvalues of the corresponding discrete-time dynamics on its Poincaré map. Finally, we propose a full controller design by combining the stable limit cycles. The validity of the proposed idea is examined by numerical simulations.
