Analysis and Implementation of Multiple Bionic Motion Patterns for Caterpillar Robot Driven by Sinusoidal Oscillator

Articulated caterpillar robot has various locomotion patterns—which make it adaptable to different tasks. Generally, the researchers have realized undulatory (transverse wave) and simple rolling locomotion. But many motion patterns are still unexplored. In this paper, peristaltic locomotion and various additional rolling patterns are achieved by employing sinusoidal oscillator with fixed phase difference as the joint controller. The usefulness of the proposed method is verified using simulation and experiment. The design parameters for different locomotion patterns have been calculated that they can be replicated in similar robots immediately.