Suspension Performance Analysis Using Adept Robot Arm

• To test the relative and absolute performances of the different suspension designs, we rigged the Adept robot arm with a custom gripper to hold the plane and conducted sinusoidal suspension analysis. The force sensor on the arm provided accurate resulting force feedback during the oscillation.
• The results were dependent on how compressed the suspension was in the zero position of the sinusoidal trajectory (i.e. whether or not the legs were loaded extra in the zero position). We ran some trials with no extra load, some with a little extra load, some with the overload protection on the toes engaged, and results were different in each case. This makes sense, since we're dealing with complex joints and any change in input from one part of one joint can cause noticeable differences. Overall, however, trends were significant: the second suspension contained much more damping, which is probably the biggest reason it works much better. It also has a higher value of friction which benefits performance as well. * Our plot comparing the two suspension systems as well as the models of each: