Tail Energized Hopping with Jerboa

Jerboa is a tailed biped with springy legs and a high powered 2 degree of freedom tail. This novel design allows us to ask questions about how a high powered tail might compensate for low degree of freedom legs. By working with a robot that can’t function without its tail, we can learn about different ways to take advantage of core actuation in ways that can be applied to spined quadrupeds.

To begin my work on, Jerboa I replicated the previous work done by Avik De by implementing a pitch unlocked tail energized gait on the boom.

Next I worked on using the tail to stabilize roll. In the following video I drop the robot and let the tail reorient the robot while the tail also reaches a positions that sets the tail up to be used for hopping.