Guidance and Control of an Autonomous Snake Robot for Space Exploration

Snake robots offer unique mobility for planetary exploration, especially in terrains inaccessible to traditional wheeled systems. This paper develops a guidance and control scheme for a snake robot using a dynamic inversion control framework to precisely track serpentine trajectories toward any desired point. The robot’s locomotion follows a traveling wave function with a time-varying adaptive offset, enabling heading modulation for path-following. This approach allows smooth trajectory tracking under constraints such as curved paths and varying terrain, and in the presence of obstacles. Simulation results highlight good performance and stability, establishing a framework for autonomous mobility in extraterrestrial environments.