Whole-Body Path-Following Control of a Multi-Steering Snake-Like Robot Performing Undulatory Locomotion

This paper presents a novel feedback control law enabling a multi-steering snake-like robot whose wheels are all passive to perform whole-body path-following undulatory locomotion in which the leading link tip and all the link ends are caused to follow a single desired free-form curved path at a variable velocity. Especially, asymptotic stability of the control law with variability of the velocity is guaranteed by the Lyapunov's second method. The validity of the control law is verified by computer simulations in which the multi-steering snake-like robot follows a surpenoid curved path periodically undulating.