Decentralized control of multi-articular snake-like robot for efficient locomotion

The mechanism of multi-articular muscles that contributes to the emergence of macroscopic behavior of animals has not been clarified thus far. To address this issue, we focus on the slithering motion of snakes, which have numerous antagonistic muscle-tendon chains that span several tens of vertebrae. From theoretical analyses based on the continuum model, the acceleration of the body in the longitudinal direction is found to be proportional to the number of segments spanned by each muscle. On the basis of this theoretical result, we propose a decentralized control scheme for the efficient locomotion of a multi-articular snake-like robot. We conduct simulations using this control scheme, and the results show that the locomotion efficiency increases as the number of segments spanned by each muscle increases.