A Novel Design of a Salamander Robot Based on 3D Skeleton Kinematics of Real Salamanders

This project addresses the design and development of an amphibious salamander robot based on the 3D kinematic data obtained from the skeleton of a real salamander. To date, studies on kinematic data have used conventional methods (e.g. markers on body) to track the body movements while focusing either on limbs or the spine. However, no study has concentrated on the kinematics of the skeleton to investigate the entire body movements in 3D by means of recorded X-ray cinematography. There are a few prototypes of salamander robots developed so far. These robots are neither designed based on the accurate kinematic data nor optimized in terms of the joints. In addition, they lack several degrees of freedom to increase the controllability and represent a closer model of the real salamanders. Furthermore, there is only one amphibious robot that could swim and walk. In this project a novel salamander-like robot was developed based on the following methodology. The kinematic data was collected from recorded X-ray videos of a real salamander. Then, necessary software tools were developed to accurately analyze the kinematic data. An optimization problem was solved to find the number and positions of the optimal joints in the spine. Based on the optimization results and also modeling simplifications, we created a model of the robot and verified the model by simulation. Finally we designed, constructed and controlled the robot to evaluate the performance of the model in practice. Although the robot was designed to address both terrestrial and aquatic locomotion, the focus of this project was on the terrestrial locomotion. The robot could be further developed to address the aquatic part (e.g. by waterproofing) which is out of the scope of this projet.