I work on polypedal systems (things with lots of legs - robots, spiders, and dogs oh my). I need to know how stable the foot configurations for these little locomotors are. I'm now making available to folks the code I use to find things like the polygon of support or longitudinal stability of moving systems. Available on github, features include:
- Simulate the foot contact positions of polypedal systems with arbitrary numbers of legs
- Find the convex hull of the polygon of support of such system
- Calculate the longitudinal stability of a system with a kinematic gait formula as described in McGhee and Frank (1968)
- Fully documented with epydoc and tested with doctest and example code
Fun for the whole family describing the movement of everything from dogs to millipedes!
This work was completed with support from the Royal Veterinary College, London (www.rvc.ac.uk).
[1] McGhee, Robert B., and Frank, Andrew A. "On the stability properties of quadruped creeping gaits." Mathematical Biosciences 3 (1968): 331-351.
A simulation of the touch down positions for a six legged robot doing a forward walking gait (rear left, mid right, fore left, rear right, mid left, fore right) with polygon of support.
Static stability of a sub optimal polyped doing forward and reverse walks from the demo software. This walkers gait is a little odd resulting in a suboptimal forward walk.