Design of neural circuit for sidewinding of snake-like robots

Abstract

This paper presents a kind of biomimetic neural circuit for simulating and implementing sidewinding of a snakelike robot. Biologically inspired by the neural circuit diagram in the spinal cord of lampreys, we propose a neural oscillator model and a chained inhibitory neural circuit. A set of leaky integrator type and sigmoid type interneurons is incorporated into the design of the neural diagram for rhythmic signal generation. The model provides explicit parameters for output modulation, including the modulation of amplitude, period, phase difference and offset. By classifying a snake-like robot into a pitch and a yaw group of modules, a sidewinding circuit is further designed to satisfy the requirement of sidewinding. Through simulation and on-site experiment, the effectiveness of the proposed model is verified in realizing sidewinding motion.

A screw-less solution for snake-like robot assembly and sensor integration

“…To replicate the behavior onto the snake-like robot, the control sequence of these modules needs to be considered. Inspired by the central pattern generators (CPG) that is responsible for coordinated pattern of rhythmic activity generation, many CPG-based methods have been proposed and applied on bio-inspired robots for gait generation [18]- [20]. Here, we follow the work [21] and use two groups of sine generators for gait implementation:…”

Development of a vision-based target exploration system for snake-like robots in structured environments

“…There have been a number of control methods developed for locomotion generation of snake-like robots, such as the gait table method, 27 the analytical method, 8 and the bioinspired method. 28 Among these methods, the sinusoidal generator, characterized by its simplicity and capability of 3-D gait generation, is considered one of the most efficient approaches for gait generation. Followed the work by Gonzalez-Gomez et al, 29 we implement the control model using two groups of sinusoidal generators where q p and q y are the reference angles for the pitch modules and the yaw modules, respectively, A p and A y denote the desired amplitude for the two groups of modules, T is the module rotating period, F p and F y represent the phase differences of the sinusoidal generators from the pitch group and the yaw group, respectively, F py is the phase difference between the pitch group and the yaw group, and O p and O y are the offsets of these sinusoidal generators.…”