Dynamic Modeling and Validation of Soft Robotic Snake Locomotion

Abstract: Soft robotic snakes made of compliant materials can continuously deform their bodies and, therefore, mimic the biological snakes' flexible and agile locomotion gaits better than their rigid-bodied counterparts. Without wheel support, to date, soft robotic snakes are limited to emulating planar locomotion gaits, which are derived via kinematic modeling and tested on robotic prototypes. Given that the snake locomotion results from the reaction forces due to the distributed contact between their skin and the ground, it is essential to investigate the locomotion gaits through efficient dynamic models capable of accommodating distributed contact forces. We present a complete spatial dynamic model that utilizes a floating-base kinematic model with distributed contact dynamics for a pneumatically powered soft robotic snake. We numerically evaluate the feasibility of the planar and spatial rolling gaits utilizing the proposed model and experimentally validate the corresponding locomotion gait trajectories on a soft robotic snake prototype. We qualitatively and quantitatively compare the numerical and experimental results which confirm the validity of the proposed dynamic model.