COBRA snake robot pushes objects to a goal with its whole body while sidewinding

Adarsh Salagame, Henry Noyes, Haroon Hublikar and Alireza Ramezani have shown closed-loop loco-manipulation with their snake robot COBRA in an arXiv paper, using the whole body both to move and to handle objects, with no dedicated appendages or grippers.

They built a contact-implicit model covering contact between robot and ground, robot and object, and object and ground, and planned trajectories over the full dynamics, guided by a geometric planner and a simple controller, so the robot pushes an object to a target while sidewinding. The planner and controller were validated on hardware in several configurations.