Navigating rugged terrain and steep slopes is a challenge for mobile robots. Conventional legged and wheeled systems struggle with these environments due to limited traction and stability. Northeastern University's COBRA (Crater Observing Bio-inspired Rolling Articulator), a novel multi-modal snake-like robot, addresses these issues by combining traditional snake gaits for locomotion on flat and inclined surfaces with a tumbling mode for controlled descent on steep slopes. Through dynamic posture manipulation, COBRA can modulate its heading angle and velocity during tumbling. This paper presents a reduced-order cascade model for COBRA's tumbling locomotion and validates it against a high-fidelity rigid-body simulation, presenting simulation results that show that the model captures key system dynamics.
@article{arxiv.2411.12970,
title = {Validation of Tumbling Robot Dynamics with Posture Manipulation for Closed-Loop Heading Angle Control},
author = {Adarsh Salagame and Eric Sihite and Alireza Ramezani},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.12970},
year = {2024}
}