A Simulator for Investigating the Effects of Morphological Variations on the Behavior of Compliant Quadruped Robots

Deciding on the suitable values for robot's morphological parameters is a complex task. Robot designers require a scientific tool to observe the influence of these parameters on the output behavior to help them decide about their implementation. Changing the structure is not an easy task even in the current available simulators. Moreover, using a dynamics engine from scratch is a complex task. In this paper, we introduce a simulator for quadruped robots using the ODE library to make the morphological study as simple as possible. It uniquely provides the opportunity to transfer morphological changes to the simulation instantly and to obtain performance characteristics such as transportation cost and robot's average speed. An illustrative example highlights the outline of this simulator, its features and capabilities.