Using 0/0/3 Accelerometer Phidget to Measure Stability

[cpayne]

Hello,

I have built a robot with a group of friends and we would like to compare how 'stable' the robot is during different operating speeds.

We rigidly attached a high precision 0/0/3 Accelerometer to the center of mass of the robot and recorded the absolute magnitude of the robot's acceleration accounting for X,Y, and Z (That is, if the robot is not moving, no matter its orientation to the earth, it will read a= 1g). Our data analysis program reports two numbers at the end of each trial. One is the average magnitude of acceleration the robot experienced during the run (as the value moves higher than 1g, the robot was experiencing more and more acceleration in some dimension during the run). The second value is the variance of the robot's acceleration.

We think we are just going to focus on the variance factor as changing acceleration seems to be the greatest source of instability.

Any thoughts about how we should use these variance and average absolute acceleration metrics to quantify stability.

Thanks!