Design and path planning for a Worm-Snake-Inspired Metameric(WSIM) Robot

Compared with the traditional wheeled and legged robots, limbless metameric robots such as snake-like and worm-like robots are more efficient in moving in an unstructured environment, which can better satisfy the requirements of special tasks such as earthquake rescue and pipeline inspection. To this end, this paper presents a renewed sense of design and the path-planning algorithm for the WSIM robot. Then, a robot prototype is established and analyzed. Experiments reveal that the robot has the ability of multi-modal locomotion, which is suitable for both open and narrow terrains. In addition, a collision-free path planning method considering kinematic constraints is proposed based on the trajectory library, bounding box, and discrete A* algorithm. The simulation results show that the algorithm is robust and well fits the WSIM robot with multi-modal locomotion capability.