Related papers: Optimizing snake locomotion in the plane. I. Compu…

Soft robotic snakes made of compliant materials can continuously deform their bodies and, therefore, mimic the biological snakes' flexible and agile locomotion gaits better than their rigid-bodied counterparts. Without wheel support, to…

Snake robots have the potential to maneuver through tightly packed and complex environments. One challenge in enabling them to do so is the complexity in determining how to coordinate their many degrees-of-freedom to create purposeful…

Many snakes live in deserts, forests, and river valleys and traverse challenging 3-D terrain like rocks, felled trees, and rubble, with obstacles as large as themselves and variable surface properties. By contrast, apart from branch…

Snake robots composed of alternating single-axis pitch and yaw joints have many internal degrees of freedom, which make them capable of versatile three-dimensional locomotion. In motion planning process, snake robot motions are often…

Limbless crawling is ubiquitous in biology, from cells to organisms. We develop and analyze a model for the dynamics of one-dimensional elastic crawlers, subject to active stress and deformation-dependent friction with the substrate. We…

Snakes can move through almost any terrain. Similarly, snake robots hold the promise as a versatile platform to traverse complex environments like earthquake rubble. Unlike snake locomotion on flat surfaces which is inherently stable, when…

Snakes can move through almost any terrain. Although their locomotion on flat surfaces using planar gaits is inherently stable, when snakes deform their body out of plane to traverse complex terrain, maintaining stability becomes a…

Snake robots offer considerable potential for endoscopic interventions due to their ability to follow curvilinear paths. Telemanipulation is an open problem due to hyper-redundancy, as input devices only allow a specification of six degrees…

The swimming of a deformable planar slab in a viscous incompressible fluid is studied on the basis of the Navier-Stokes equations. A continuum of plane wave displacements, symmetric on both sides of the slab and characterized by a…

In this paper we propose a method for computing the contour of an object in an image using a snake represented as a subdivision curve. The evolution of the snake is driven by its control points which are computed minimizing an energy that…

Of the vast variety of animal gaits, one of the most striking is the non-planar undulating motion of a sidewinder. But non-planar gaits are not limited to sidewinders. Here we report a new non-planar mode used as an escape strategy in…

With the aim of providing a first step in the quest for a reduction of the aerodynamic drag on the rear-end of a car, we study the phenomena of separation and reattachment of an incompressible flow focusing on a specific aerodynamic…

Inspired by the dynamic coupling of moto-neurons and physical elasticity in animals, this work explores the possibility of generating locomotion gaits by utilizing physical oscillations in a soft snake by means of a low-level spiking neural…

Turbulent channel flow controlled by spanwise wall oscillations is studied using direct numerical simulations to improve how spanwise forcing reduces skin-friction drag. Harmonic wall oscillations generate a periodic transverse Stokes layer…

We study the efficiency of search processes based on Levy flights (LFs) with power-law distributed jump lengths in the presence of an external drift. While LFs turn out to be efficient search processes when relative to the starting point…

Flying snakes use a unique method of aerial locomotion: they jump from tree branches, flatten their bodies and undulate through the air to produce a glide. The shape of their body cross-section during the glide plays an important role in…

In turbulent flows, tracking the source of a passive scalar cue requires exploiting the limited information that can be gleaned from rare, stochastic encounters with the cue. When crafting a search policy, the most challenging and important…

Object manipulation has been extensively studied in the context of fixed base and mobile manipulators. However, the overactuated locomotion modality employed by snake robots allows for a unique blend of object manipulation through…

This paper presents an optimization-based motion planning methodology for snake robots operating in constrained environments. By using a reduced-order model, the proposed approach simplifies the planning process, enabling the optimizer to…

Screw-based propulsion systems offer promising capabilities for amphibious mobility, yet face significant challenges in optimizing locomotion across water, granular materials, and transitional environments. This study presents a systematic…