Symbiotic Organism Search-based Locomotion of Underwater Snake Robot in various Environments

Abstract

Biological snakes can efficiently move from one place to another in different environmental conditions. Inspired by such locomotion behaviours, a biomimetic snake robot should have some adaptability features to foster several engineering applications. In this work, for energy-efficient locomotion, the optimal gait parameters of an underwater snake robot are investigated at the expense of different environmental drag force conditions and water current velocity. At first, mathematical modelling of underwater snake robot is briefly presented. Thereafter, a symbiotic organism search (SOS) algorithm is exploited to obtained the optimal gait parameters subjected to the cost function of maximum tangential velocity and minimum power consumption. The simulation runs have shown the potential of the proposed optimization algorithm for a cost effective locomotion of the underwater snake robot.