  Experimental analysis of the mechanics of a deformable object, and
particularly its stability, requires repetitive testing and, depending on the
complexity of the object's shape, a testing setup that can manipulate many
degrees of freedom at the object's boundary. Motivated by recent advancements
in robotic manipulation of deformable objects, this paper addresses these
challenges by constructing a method for automated stability testing of a
slender elastic rod -- a canonical example of a deformable object -- using a
robotic system. We focus on rod configurations with helical centerlines since
the stability of a helical rod can be described using only three parameters,
but experimentally determining the stability requires manipulation of both the
position and orientation at one end of the rod, which is not possible using
traditional experimental methods that only actuate a limited number of degrees
of freedom. Using a recent geometric characterization of stability for helical
rods, we construct and implement a manipulation scheme to explore the space of
stable helices, and we use a vision system to detect the onset of instabilities
within this space. The experimental results obtained by our automated testing
system show good agreement with numerical simulations of elastic rods in
helical configurations. The methods described in this paper lay the groundwork
for automation to grow within the field of experimental mechanics.
