The Kinematics of Hyper-redundant Robot Locomotion
February 15, 2021
Jeremiah Hendren
Chirikjian*, Gregory S., and Joel W. Burdick**IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation 11, no. 6 (1995): 781-793https://doi.org/10.1109/70.478426
* Professor at Johns Hopkins
Inchworms, earthworms, snakes, and slugs have morphologies that can be considered hyper-redundant. Nature has evolved a diverse set of ways for these creatures to locomote. For example, slugs locomote via locomotory pulses, or pedal waves. Snakes use three primary gait categories, termed the lateral undulatory, sidewinding, and concertina modes, whose qualitative properties have been widely studied. Some varieties of snake also use “creeping gaits” during predation. This form of locomotion, which depends on a rhythmic expansion and contraction of the snake’s muscles, has much in common kinematically with the movement of earthworms through soil. Many of these forms of undulatory biological locomotion can be idealized as traveling or stationary waves of body deformation. This observation guides our implementation of hyper-redundant robot locomotion gaits. The term “locomotion" wave” or “wave” will often be used to describe the mechanism deformations associated with these wave-like gaits. It should be stressed that this paper is not an analysis of biological locomotion, but is instead a study of how to implement hyper-redundant robot locomotion gaits that have biological counterparts.
Gregory Chirikjian & Joel Burdick