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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Electron.
Sec. Flexible Electronics
Volume 6 - 2025 |
doi: 10.3389/felec.2025.1507644
This article is part of the Research Topic Design, Modelling and Fabrication of Soft robots for Underwater Applications View all articles
Stable Heteroclinic Channels for Controlling a Simulated Aquatic Serpentine Robot in Narrow Crevices
Provisionally accepted- Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, United States
Stable Heteroclinic Channels (SHCs) are dynamical systems composed of connected saddle equilibria. We demonstrate that movement primitives based on SHCs enable learnable swimming gaits for a six segment simulated snake robot in an obstacle-free environment. The SHC controller readily integrates tactile feedback, adapting the frequency and amplitude of the gait to accommodate various environments. With tactile feedback, the SHC controller optimized for speed and efficiency in unobstructed environments swims 25.3% faster on average in a set of 45 randomly generated uneven passages compared with a serpenoid controller, which derives joint trajectories from sinusoids. We additionally show that the trajectory amplitude scales linearly with SHC parameters, which enables transparency in gait design. This research demonstrates that SHCs benefit from intuitive tuning like serpenoid control, while also effectively incorporating sensory information to generate smooth kinematic trajectories characteristic of other CPG frameworks.
Keywords: stable heteroclinic channels, Snake robot, autonomy, central pattern generator, motor primitive, Control
Received: 08 Oct 2024; Accepted: 31 Jan 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Mengers, Rouse and Daltorio. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Nathaniel Mengers, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, United States
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