Effects of spinal joint on quadrupedal bounding

This paper studies the effects of a spinal joint on quadrupedal running with a bounding gait. Both models have the actuated hips and legs with masses and inertias. In this work, we used the numerical return map to find periodic locomotion of both models then, by comparing the performance of an articulated-body quadruped to a rigid-body one, we observed that the presence of spinal joint helps the robot increase the stride length and clearly affect the locomotion efficiency.