Design concept and undulatory motion mode of a modular snake-like robot

In this paper, the design of a wheeled hyperredundant mobile robot is first described. The long-term objective of our research is to build a vehicle for teleoperation that would be `transparent´ for the operator. Both the mechanical and the control structures of the robot were thought as modular. The mechanical structure of each module is based on 4 degrees of freedom: two rotation joints (one vertical and one horizontal), and two wheels. At the present time the prototype is composed of five modules. In the second part of this paper, a particular motion mode is proposed. It is based on the propagation of the same patterns along the body. Such a motion mode requires only one simple control algorithm which is the same for all the CPUs. Several movement modes were defined and their effectiveness were discussed