Motivation

Although snakes have a very simple body structure without limbs, they exhibit highly adaptive behavior in unpredictable real-world constraints. For example, snakes can move at will on trees, on uneven terrain, in narrow spaces, in the water etc.. If we can understand the mechanisms of such locomotion, it will help to develop robots that work well in undefined environment.

Approach

Autonomous decentralized control mechanisms could be a key to understanding locomotion of snakes because they are suitable for controlling systems that have a large amount of the degrees of freedom, such as snakes.
We design autonomous decentralized control schemes by observations of real snakes. Then we develop snake-like robots to confirm the validity of these schemes with real-world experiments.