Evidence for Spring Loaded Inverted Pendulum Running in a Hexapod Robot

This paper presents the first evidence that the Spring Loaded Inverted Pendulum (SLIP) may be “anchored” in our recently designed compliant leg hexapod robot, RHex. Experimentally measured RHex center of mass trajectories are fit to the SLIP model and an analysis of the fitting error is performed. The fitting results are corroborated by numerical simulations. The “anchoring” of SLIP dynamics in RHex offers exciting possibilities for hierarchical control of hexapod robots