Design concept and undulatory motion mode of a modular snake-like robot

In this paper, the design of a wheeled hyperredundant mobile robot is first described. The long-term objective of our research is to build a vehicle for teleoperation that would be 'transparent' for the operator. Both the mechanical and the control structures of the robot were thought as modular. The mechanical structure of each module is based on 4 degrees of freedom: two rotation joints (one vertical and one horizontal), and two wheels. At the present time the prototype is composed of five modules. In the second part of this paper, a particular motion mode is proposed. It is based on the propagation of the same patterns along the body. Such a motion mode requires only one simple control algorithm which is the same for all the CPUs. Several movement modes were defined and their effectiveness were discussed.