An amphibious snake-like robot with terrestrial and aquatic gaits

This paper presents the mechanism design, control system, terrestrial and aquatic gaits of an amphibious snake-like robot "Perambulator" developed in State Key Laboratory of Robotics, Shenyang Institute of Automation (SIA), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Previous researches have been done on amphibious snake-like robots, among which Amphibot series and ACM-R5 are the most famous ones. The joints of Amphibot I and Amphibot II are of yaw DOF design, so they only have two-dimensional motion capability; ACM-R5 is a three-dimensional amphibious snake-like robot and it has an ingenious design in its joint, which is with two pairs of sector gears located perpendicularly on its both sides to realize the yaw DOF and the pitch DOF.