The CR geometry of the three-segment snake

We study the geometry associated with the kinematics of a planar robot known as the “three-segment snake,” whose velocity distribution belongs to a class of (2,3,5) distributions. We discover that, under certain assumptions on its construction parameters, the snake may be endowed with a CR structure of CR dimension 1 and real codimension 3. We solve the associated Cartan equivalence problem and find the invariants of the snake’s CR structure.