Abstract
This paper is concerned with a novel kind of wheeled mobile robot, called the trident snake robot. From a viewpoint of nonlinear control theory, this robot is classified as a nonholonomic system with two generators and higher order Lie brackets, whose controllability structure is extremely complicated in comparison to conventional nonholonomic systems. Based on differential geometric analysis of the controllability Lie algebra, we clarify its locomotion principle through constructing periodic motion control for pure rotation and translation. The proposed approach is examined with numerical simulations.
