Gait Design Method for a Snake Robot by Fitting a Non-smooth Backbone Curve

This paper presents a gait design method for a snake robots fit non-smooth backbone curves. Introducing bending angles at the points where the directions of tangent vectors of the backbone curve changes discontinuously breaks the restriction that the left and right limits of tangent vectors at each point on the backbone curve fitting the target shape of the snake robot must be the same, which makes the design of the target trunk curve simpler and more convenient. The method was utilized to design gaits for spanning motions between parallel and intersecting bars. The gaits in both scenarios are demonstrated in simulation to validate the effectiveness of the fitting method and the gaits.