Experimental study of passive creeping for a snake-like robot

The control of a snake-like robot is a challenging problem because of unknown environments and complex dynamics. We have proposed an energy-based method, called passive creeping, to control the serpentine locomotion. In the paper, we present a hypothesis that the energy state of the robot can influence the locomotor adaptation. And then we lay emphasis on experiments in order to test the hypothesis and validate the passive creeping. A locomotion experiment and a drag experiment demonstrate the adaptability of the passive creeping to variable environments and different dynamics (or payloads), respectively. In the experiments, an optical motion capture system is used to obtain the kinetic energy information of the snake-like robot in real time.