The robots discussed in the foregoing consist of a body and either wheels or legs to provide mobility. Several investigators have also constructed articulated, segmented robots whose motion approximates that of snakes. It shows a snake robot developed at the Fraunhofer Institute for Autonomous Intelligent Systems in Germany.It shows a snake robot designed and constructed by Kevin Dowling at Carnegie Mellon University.
The undulating movement of a snake (or, equivalently, an eel, such as the lamprey)requires coordination and sequencing of muscle contractions along the spinal cord, enabling the successive segments of the animal to move in turn (Grillner and Dubuc 1988). Thus, building a robot snake requires the construction of a ultisegmented body with the appropriate control sequence to allow smooth, undulating movements, as in Ostrowski and Burdick 1996 and Dowling 1997. The movements of a snake are assumed to be controlled by central pattern generators in the spinal cord (Grillner and Dubuc 1988). The Dowling snake consists of ten segments; each link has a 2-dof servo, thus allowing movement in three dimensions.The front segment holds a television camera, thus providing for the robot a ‘‘snake’s eye’’ view of the world.
