Design of Rolling Motion for Snake-Like Robots Using Center-of-Gravity Shift

Abstract The snake-like robot can travel over environments that are difficult for wheeled mobility mechanisms. However, undulating locomotion requires high power consumption. We propose an efficient method that integrates the center-of-gravity (COG) shifting for the navigation of the robot to address the aforementioned problem. The proposed method allows the use of rolling motion with high traveling efficiency on level ground and undulating locomotion in water as well as other uneven surfaces. In this paper, we present a design method using the multi-objective genetic algorithm in terms of the traveling velocity of the robot, load, and energy consumption of the servomotor. The results of the motion design show that the COG shift motion mode was obtained as the optimal solution. It was observed that the COG shift motion with the designed parameters can achieve high traveling efficiency compared to that with conventional undulating locomotion by experiment.