Steering of pedal wave of a snake-like robot by superposition of curvatures

A snake-like robot has an advantage in moving into a narrow space. Particularly "pedal wave", which is one of its locomotion styles, is suitable for entering a thin path. However, pedal wave have been used only for going straight in most of the prior studies. In particular horizontal steering of pedal wave by a real robot has not been investigated sufficiently. Therefore in this paper we studied a kinematically appropriate steering method of pedal wave using a continuous snake-like robot model. We proposed steering by superposition of a steering curvatures and a pedal wave's curvature, and investigated the condition of suitable steering curvature using kinematic simulations. The proposed steering method was verified by experiments with a real snake-like robot.