Terrestrial snakes, aquatic snakes, and sandfish lizards are observed to adopt different configurations for locomotion, although they all employ the snake-like un-dulatory wriggling motion. Here we show that these differences may be dominated by the movement and energy efficiencies imposed by mechanical deformation and interaction with environments. Based on a slender soft beam model, a systematical framework is developed to explore and compare the movement and energy efficiencies of the snake-like lateral undulation in terrestrial, aquatic and sand environments. Indeed, it is found that the locomotion configuration of the soft body is highly relevant to the efficiency factors. Optimal un-dulatory configurations are obtained for each environment, which are qualitatively consistent with the biological ones. The present study reveals the mechanism behind the locomotion adaptation of the un-dulatory wriggling motion for navigating through different environments, which sheds light on developing amphibious/all-terrain soft robots, while, at the same time, broadens our cognition of nature's strategies for locomotion.

陆生蛇、水生蛇和沙鱼蜥蜴被观察到采用不同的运动配置，尽管它们都采用蛇状不规律的蠕动运动。在这里，我们表明这些差异可能由机械变形和与环境的相互作用所施加的运动和能量效率所主导。基于细长的软梁模型，开发了一个系统的框架来探索和比较蛇形横向起伏在陆地、水生和沙地环境中的运动和能量效率。事实上，发现软体的运动配置与效率因素高度相关。为每个环境获得了最佳的非波动配置，这与生物环境在质量上是一致的。