Development and Control Experiment of the Trident Snake Robot

This paper is concerned with the development of the trident snake robot, a new example of nonholonomic mobile robot proposed by the authors. The robot has three-pointed shape composed of a center block and three branches, each of which has a passive nonslide wheel. It is modeled as a nonnilpotent driftless system with two generators; its control is a challenging problem, not only because it cannot be treated by continuous control law, but because it cannot be converted to any easy class of nonholonomic systems such as chained form. In this paper, we realized the one-link trident snake robot and applied a periodic control algorithm based on Lie bracket motion. Effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is examined with control experiments.