Design of neural circuit for sidewinding of snake-like robots

This paper presents a kind of biomimetic neural circuit for simulating and implementing sidewinding of a snakelike robot. Biologically inspired by the neural circuit diagram in the spinal cord of lampreys, we propose a neural oscillator model and a chained inhibitory neural circuit. A set of leaky integrator type and sigmoid type interneurons is incorporated into the design of the neural diagram for rhythmic signal generation. The model provides explicit parameters for output modulation, including the modulation of amplitude, period, phase difference and offset. By classifying a snake-like robot into a pitch and a yaw group of modules, a sidewinding circuit is further designed to satisfy the requirement of sidewinding. Through simulation and on-site experiment, the effectiveness of the proposed model is verified in realizing sidewinding motion.