Stability Measure Comparison for the Design of a Dynamic Running Robot

Estimating the effect of design changes on the stability of robots designed to run over rough terrain is a difficult task. No current predictor or measure is currently universally accepted. The most common techniques, including the ‘stability margins’ commonly used in walking machines and the return-map eigenvalue analysis used on simple models, are not fully applicable to these fast and complex systems. This paper describes a comparison of a number of approaches to measuring stability applied to a redesign of our hexapedal robot, Sprawl.