New rolling and crawling gaits for snake-like robots

Numerous kinematic structures have been developed for snake-like robots over the past several decades. A well studied structure consists of a series of rigid segments coupled with rotational joints. In some designs, adjacent segments are coupled with a 2-DOF pitch/yaw joint. In others, segments are coupled through 1-DOF joints, with joints alternating between pitch and yaw. This paper focuses on a robotic snake that implements both rotational and translational degrees of freedom in each joint. The added translational degrees give rise to several new gaits. In the paper, we present a new rectilinear crawling gait and two new rolling gaits. These gaits are analyzed through simulation, and compared to existing crawling and rolling gaits.