Path Following Control of Planar Snake Robots Using a Cascaded Approach

This paper considers path following control of snake robots along straight paths. Under the assumption that the forward velocity of the snake robot is nonzero and positive, we prove that the proposed path following controller <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">K</tex></formula> -exponentially stabilizes a snake robot to any desired straight path. The performance of the path following controller is investigated through simulations and through experiments with a physical snake robot, where the controller successfully steers the snake robot toward and along the desired straight path.