Snake-inspired locomotion is much more maneuverable compared to conventional locomotion concepts and it enables a robot to navigate through rough terrain. A rectilinear gait is quite flexible and has the following benefits: functionality on a wide variety of terrains, enables a highly stable robot platform, and provides pure undulatory motion without passive wheels. These benefits make rectilinear gaits especially suitable for search and rescue applications. However, previous robot designs utilizing rectilinear gaits were slow in speed and required considerable vertical motion. This dissertation will explore the development and implementation of a new exaggerated rectilinear gait that which will enable high speed locomotion and more efficient operation in a snake-inspired robot platform. The exaggerated rectilinear gait will emulate the natural snake’s rectilinear gait to gain the benefit a snake’s terrain adaptability, but the sequence and range of joint motion will be greatly exaggerated to achieve higher velocities to support robot speeds within the range of human walking speed. The following issues will be investigated in this dissertation. First, this dissertation will address the challenge of developing a snake-inspired robot capable of executing

In this paper we restrict our attention to worm-like, vertical traveling wave locomotion and present detailed kinematics and dynamics of a planar multi-link snake robot. Lagrange’s method is used to obtain the robot dynamics. Webots software is used for simulation and to experimentally investigate the effects of link shape on motor torques. Using the dynamics model and Webots simulation, a nine-link snake robot is designed and constructed. Physical experiments are carried out to validate the mathematical model. Webots software is also used to perform simulation and further validate theoretical results. Finally, stability of the snake robot is experimentally investigated.

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Abstract — This paper describes the development of a simula-tion software that advances the idea of a robotic device inspired by ringed worm’s locomotion. Its basic design is made up of an elongated body that is composed of a spring-style skeleton which is coated by a flexible skin. Our principle approach is to choose a shape memory alloy material for the skeleton, resulting in different spring forces exerted by the body under varying temperatures. The overall approach requires the elastic skin to prestress the whole body in its rest position, so that it can spatially extend when thermal energy is induced to the system, and relax when an inbuilt air cooling mechanism dissipates the heat. Index Terms — simulation, snake-like robot, shape memory alloy I.

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ABSTRACT: A significant challenge in evolutionary robotics is that the evolved solutions face significant and often insurmountable difficulties when attempting to cross the simulation- reality transference gap. As a result, most of the evolved solutions remain as conceptual designs that are constrained to perform only within the simulation environment. Moreover, the deployment of a fully autonomous robot is an extremely complex, costly, and time-intensive endeavor. In our previous investigations, we have successfully employed a multi-objective co-evolutionary approach to automatically design and optimize a fully autonomous snake-like modular robot to acquire different moving behaviours for effective locomotion. Following the promising research from our previous work, this line of investigation is extended in this study to specifically combine the evolutionary robotics approach with 3D printing in the form of fused deposition modeling to explore the transferability of the evolved solutions from simulation environment to real world deployment. The main goal of this study is to provide a rapid and cost-effective automated design, fabrication and deployment methodology for autonomous snake-like modular robot in order for real world applications. A total of three different moving behaviours were explored for the acquisition and real-world testing by the constructed snake-like modular robot for effective locomotion, which are the lateral undulation, vertical undulation and lateral rolling moving behaviours. Moreover, a unique slot-in method is introduced in this work in designing and fabricating the snake-like modular robot’s hardware parts to ease the robot assembling process. The results from this study show that the transference from simulated to real-world robots is

Due to various factors, the global disaster events occur inevitably every year. Terrorism, natural disasters or destructive earthquakes tend to cause a large number of people buried in the ruins of buildings. Using scien-

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Abstract—Understanding and adapting the underlying princi-ples of biological systems to engineering systems have the promise of enabling many new mechatronic systems that can operate in