A Spiral Curve Gait Design for a Modular Snake Robot Moving on a Pipe

Modular snake robot has the ability to maneuver narrow, complex, and unstructured environments. In recent years, Snake robot with 3-D locomotion has been studied by researchers for inspection of pipes, and stairs climbing etc. One of the effective approaches to accomplishing such complex tasks is by designing gaits for modular snake robot. In this paper, A Spiral curve gait along with rolling motion is proposed to adapt to the changes in the pipe diameter while moving on the pipe, which cannot be overcome by a simple helical rolling motion. The joint angles are calculated using Bellow’s model, based on the curvature and torsion of the backbone curve. We validated the proposed gait by simulating thirty degrees of freedom modular snake robot in Open Dynamics Engine simulator.