To appear in 1994 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation

Analysis and simulations are performed for a simpliied model of a commercially available variant of the skateboard, known as the Snakeboard 1. Although the model exhibits basic gait patterns seen in a large number of locomotion problems, the analysis tools currently available do not apply to this problem. The diiculty lies primarily in the way in which the non-holonomic constraints enter into the system. As a rst step towards understanding systems represented by our model we present the equations of motion and perform some controlla-bility analysis for the snakeboard. We also perform numerical simulations of possible gait patterns which are characteristic of snakeboard locomotion.