Related papers: Non-planar snake gaits: from Stigmatic-starts to S…
Nature suggests that exploiting the elasticities and natural dynamics of robotic systems could increase their locomotion efficiency. Prior work on elastic snake robots supports this hypothesis, but has not fully exploited the nonlinear…
Snake robots are characterized by their ability to navigate through small spaces and loose terrain by utilizing efficient cyclic forms of locomotion. Soft snake robots are a subset of these robots which utilize soft, compliant actuators to…
Snakes are a remarkable evolutionary success story. Many snake-inspired robots have been proposed over the years. Soft robotic snakes (SRS) with their continuous and smooth bending capability better mimic their biological counterparts'…
Soft robotic snakes (SRSs) have a unique combination of continuous and compliant properties that allow them to imitate the complex movements of biological snakes. Despite the previous attempts to develop SRSs, many have been limited to…
We optimize three-dimensional snake kinematics for locomotor efficiency. We assume a general space-curve representation of the snake backbone with small-to-moderate lifting off the ground and negligible body inertia. The cost of locomotion…
We have developed a toy model of flying snake's glide [J.J. Socha, Nature vol. 418 (2002) 603.] by modifying a model for a falling paper. We have found that asymmetric oscillation is a key about why snake can glide. Further investigation…
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…
Snakes' bodies are covered in scales that make it easier to slide in some directions than in others. This frictional anisotropy allows for sliding locomotion with an undulatory gait, one of the most common for snakes. Isotropic friction is…
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…
We examine the problem of snake-like locomotion by studying a system consisting of a planar inextensible elastic rod that is able to control its spontaneous curvature. Using a Cosserat model we derive, through variational principles, the…
Limbless organisms such as snakes can navigate nearly all terrain. In particular, desert-dwelling sidewinder rattlesnakes (Crotalus cerastes) operate effectively on inclined granular media (such as sand dunes) that induce failure in…
Gaits engineered for snake-like robots to rotate in-place instrumentally fill a gap in the set of locomotive gaits that have traditionally prioritized translation. This paper designs a Turn-in-Place gait and demonstrates the ability of a…
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…
We develop a model to study the locomotion of snakes on an inclined plane. We determine numerically which snake motions are optimal for two retrograde traveling-wave body shapes---triangular and sinusoidal waves---across a wide range of…
Terrestrial locomotion requires generating appropriate ground reaction forces which depend on substrate geometry and physical properties. The richness of positions and orientations of terrain features in the 3-D world gives limbless animals…
In this theoretical study, we present an analytical framework to investigate the slithering motion of snakes on flat surfaces. While previous studies have predominantly relied on numerical methods to identify optimal locomotion kinematics,…
Limbless terrestrial animals exhibit exceptional locomotor versatility and control, currently unmatched by engineered counterparts. Here, we introduce a computational framework that enables soft synthetic snakes to navigate unstructured,…
We determine analytically the form of optimal snake locomotion when the coefficient of transverse friction is large, the typical regime for biological and robotic snakes. We find that the optimal snake motion is a retrograde traveling wave,…
Snake moves across various terrains by bending its elongated body. Recent studies discovered that snakes can use vertical bending to traverse terrain of large height variation, such as horizontally oriented cylinders, a wedge (Jurestovsky,…
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…