Gavin Miller, who puts together the Snakebots page, is one of the early developers of serpentine robotics. His work goes back to the early 1990's when he was still at Apple Computer, and developed algorithms for serpentine motion that were originally used to showcase Quicktime 3D as a tool for animation and simulation work. If you want to look at some even earlier work that was really pioneering, check out the research by
Shigeo Hirose at the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Dr. Hirose has probably been doing this longer than anyone else).
Here are a few more:
-
Howie Choset's work at CMU in serpentine robotics.
-
Mark Sherman's Slither page.
- The
University of Michigan Omnitread is here.
There are several web directories regarding serpentine robotics and biomorphic systems that will probably of interest as well. One of the best is the
Collection of Snake-Like Robots.
-dave