The effect of spine morphology on rapid acceleration in quadruped robots

Abstract

An actuated spine appears to be a critical component for maneuverability in quadruped animals. However, robotic systems have yet to capitalize on this mechanism. This research compares three different spine morphologies in the planar case, namely the rigid, revolute and prismatic spine. Using a wide range of robots sampled from the design space (200 robots sampled at random), large-scale trajectory optimization (60 seed points per robot per spine morphology) was used to determine the best spine morphology in terms of stride averaged acceleration. Bootstrapping was performed on the results to achieve a better statistical representation and this revealed that for 75% of the robots, a prismatic spine design is the most effective at rapid acceleration, followed by the revolute spine at 6% and rigid spine at 18%.