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Title: The Omega Turn: A Biologically-Inspired Turning Strategy for Elongated Limbless Robots
Snake robots have the potential to locomotethrough tightly packed spaces, but turning effectively withinunmodelled and unsensed environments remains challenging.Inspired by a behavior observed in the tiny nematode wormC.elegans, we propose a novel in-place turning gait for elongatedlimbless robots. To simplify the control of the robots’ many in-ternal degrees-of-freedom, we introduce a biologically-inspiredtemplate in which two co-planar traveling waves are superposedto produce an in-plane turning motion, theomega turn. Theomega turn gait arises from modulating the wavelengths andamplitudes of the two traveling waves. We experimentally testthe omega turn on a snake robot, and show that this turninggait outperforms previous turning gaits: it results in a largerangular displacement and a smaller area swept by the bodyover a gait cycle, allowing the robot to turn in highly confinedspaces.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1764406 1806833
PAR ID:
10253624
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
Page Range / eLocation ID:
7766 to 7771
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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