Obtaining contact parameters for MBDS of a wheelless snake robot

This paper shows a way to obtain contact parameters for multi-body dynamics simulation (MBDS) of a wheelless snake robot, KAEROT-snake V. We developed a simulation model of the snake robot in a commercial MBDS software RecurDyn(V8). RecurDyn provides a convenient way to model contact geometries directly from CAD models, which are very close to the actual shape. Contact parameters such as spring, damping and friction coefficient are very important in MBDS so that we obtained the contact parameters through experiments of falling and sliding test. The contact parameters were obtained by analyzing the images of the test and the MBDS simulation of the test. Some locomotion simulation results for the snake robot were experimentally verified.