I made a servo ‘snake arm’ unit for production calibration of the accelerometers in our Vehicle Intertia Monitor IMU as attached. http://www.yashu.com
What may be pertinent to you is the manufacturer of the servos called Robotis. They are nice with integrated 32-bit ARM uC and GMR encoder feedback which provides smooth controlled motion along with very accurate positioning info. The protocol is reasonably documented for a Korean company. The servos can be daisy chained and bolted together with various coupling adapters.
https://www.trossenrobotics.com/m/robotis.aspx
I seem to remember a COTS offering using these servos for a master/slave arm setup in which one arm is input to control the other output arm. The motion pattern could be logged and played back.