  Snakes are a remarkable evolutionary success story. Many snake-inspired
robots have been proposed over the years. Soft robotic snakes (SRS) with their
continuous and smooth bending capability better mimic their biological
counterparts' unique characteristics. Prior SRSs are limited to planar
operation with a limited number of planar gaits. We propose a novel SRS with
spatial bending and investigate snake locomotion gaits beyond the capabilities
of the state-of-the-art systems. We derive a complete floating-base kinematic
model of the robot and use the model to derive jointspace trajectories for
serpentine and inward/outward rolling locomotion gaits. The locomotion gaits
for the proposed SRS are experimentally validated under varying frequency and
amplitude of gait cycles. The results qualitatively and quantitatively validate
the SRS ability to leverage spatial bending to achieve locomotion gaits not
possible with current SRS.
