COORDINATES MATTER: VIRTUAL CHASSIS AND MINIMUM PERTURBATION COORDINATE REPRESENTATIONS

Although any set of generalized coordinates can be used to represent the motion of a system, the choice of coordinates can greatly effect the ease of its analysis. Notably, the choice of body frame can affect a system’s representational clarity as well as the computational accuracy of any linear approximations. In this paper we examine how departing from the typical convention of rigidly fixing a body frame to a system and instead carefully choosing the body frame can provide these benefits to a number of articulated locomoting systems, namely modular snake robots and planar swimming systems.