Biomimetic Centering for Undulatory Robots

Substantial work exists in the undulatory robotics literature on the mechanical design, modeling, gait generation and implementation of robotic prototypes. However, there appears to have been relatively limited work on the use of exteroceptive sensors in control schemes leading to more complex reactive undulatory behaviors. This paper considers a biologically-inspired sensor-based centering behavior for undulatory robots, originally developed for nonholonomic mobile robots. Adaptation to the significantly more complex dynamics of undulatory locomotors highlights a number of issues related to the use of sensors (possibly distributed over the elongated body of the mechanism) for the generation of reactive behaviors, to biomimetic neuromuscular control and to formation control of multi-undulatory swarms. These issues are explored via computational tools specifically geared towards undulatory locomotion in robotics and biology