Design and Experiments of Snake Robots with Docking Function

This paper presents a novel snake robot with the docking function, which can help the snake robots to connect with each other to achieve a stronger one with double length and double degrees of freedom. First, the mechanical design of the snake robot with docking function is introduced, including the body link and the head-tail passive docking mechanical structure. Second, the control system is built, and the control strategies of locomotion and docking are separately proposed. Then, the visual perception function is implemented for the target recognition during the docking process. Finally, the prototype is developed. The mobility and the docking function are fully verified and analyzed through the physical experiments.

I. Introduction

Even though snakes only have soft bodies without limbs, the mobility of snakes is strong enough to handle fields, deserts, trees and even rivers. Thus the bionic snake robots are proposed to perform a wide variety of tasks in the extreme environments, especially for some narrow spaces like pipes and ruins [1].