ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on certain aspects of RABBIT’s and ERNIE’s experimental setups that are relevant to control design and deals with a discussion of the experimental issues. The floor on which RABBIT walks is concrete with 30 cm wide cabling access trenches covered with 4 mm steel plates. In preliminary experiments, it was found that after stepping on one of the four plates crossing RABBIT’s path, RABBIT would slow significantly. For RABBIT walking on the wood and rubber walking surface the amount of energy dissipated at impact had to be scaled to be less than the value predicted by the rigid model at low walking speeds and greater at higher walking speeds. The boom attached to the hip constrains RABBIT’s motions to a “sagittal plane” that is tangent to a sphere centered at the universal joint that connects the boom to the center stand. The inertia of the boom system is significant enough to require incorporation into RABBIT’s model.