A novel mechanism for caterpillar-like locomotion using asymmetric oscillation

This paper presents a novel mechanism to implement caterpillar-like locomotion. First, the caterpillar-like locomotive pattern in nature is investigated and analyzed systematically. From a biological point of view, caterpillar locomotion can be abstracted as a body wave, called half wave. It is simple, but efficient. In this paper, a novel control mechanism, maintaining the half wave property, is integrated into an improved central pattern generator (CPG) model. For the first time, an asymmetric oscillation is employed on the model for gait generation. The movement is proved stable according to a kinematic analysis. Modulation is able to use to change the shape of the half wave during locomotion. A series of simulation shows the feasibility of using asymmetric oscillators for locomotion. Furthermore, the latest results obtained demonstrate that the proposed asymmetric locomotion mechanism is easy to implement while offering a satisfactory motion performance in on-site experiments.