Abstract

When serpentine robots move in the complex and unstructured environment, collisions between the serpentine robot and obstacles often impede its movement. In this paper, collision feedback-based lateral undulation gait is proposed, which utilizes collisions between the serpentine robot and obstacles to change robot's trajectory, or relies on obstacles to guide the locomotion of the serpentine robot. When the robot's head collides with an obstacle, the direction of motion changes, the robot performs global planning of the motion gait through steering control. An angle adaptive control based on load feedback is proposed for local gait planning of robots. When the robot joint load exceeds the set threshold, the joint angle is adjusted in time to adapt to terrain changes. Experiments are conducted to cross different obstacles using different control methods, and comparisons are made in terms of energy loss and motion rate. The experimental results show that this gait has the lowest energy consumption while ensuring the robot's motion rate.