Limbless conforming gaits with modular robots

• 9th International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER '04)

This paper presents experimentation using the PolyBot modular robot of two limbless gaits which conform to environment. A conforming loop gait is low profile and traverses over a variety of obstacles where the ratio of the height of the obstacle to robot is up to 1.3. A concertina snake gait is capable of negotiating narrow passages (for example a width of double the width of the robot itself), including those with bends as sharp as 110º. It is well suited to locomotion in unstructured tunnels. One little appreciated point that is emphasized in this paper is that the difficulty of an environment is always relative to size of the robot itself.

citation

Yim, M. H. ; Eldershaw, C. ; Zhang, Y. ; Duff, D. G. Limbless Conforming Gaits with Modular Robots. 9th International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER04); 2004 June 18-21; Singapore.