The ability to sense contact forces helps animals understand a novel environment and adjust to move through. Generalist snakes are presumably exceptionally good at doing so, as they quickly and stably traverse various complex terrain by transitioning across strategies. However, we know little about how distributed force sensing is used to control and adjust the deformation of their elongate body in response to the terrain to generate effective locomotion. Discovering the physical principles of this process will help uncover the feedback control strategies of generalist snakes in complex terrain. It will also help snake robots better traverse challenging terrain like earthquake rubble. Here, we developed a sensorized snake robot and used it as a physical model to discover the physical principles of distributed force sensing and feedback control of snake locomotion in complex 3-D terrain. Because commercial force sensors are bulky and expensive, we applied a low-cost, flexible pressure sensor array distributed around all body segments. Calibration showed that the sensor array can measure distributed ground reaction forces of 10% body weight at 30 locations along the body at 10 Hz, despite disturbance from self-deformation of the moving body. We are developing force-based feedback control to further enable variation of control strategy. Based on our animal observation (see other talk by Fu, Astley, Li, Snakes traversing complex 3-D terrain), we will test the robot in complex terrain to understand how forces are related to the observed motion. We are also exploring ways to increase the sensor array’s sensitivity and developing a sensorized complex terrain platform to measure distributed ground reaction forces in biological snakes.