Comprehensive Locomotion Performance Evaluation of All-Terrain Robots

Information about the locomotion performance of known rovers is sparse. A comprehensive evaluation of wheeled passive systems is presented in this work. It is based on a static 2D approach that includes optimization of the wheel torques in order to minimize the required friction which is an important performance metric. The evaluation comprises well known rover concepts and new suspension systems. The performance of the systems is compared and interesting effects of some concepts are discussed in more detail including torques and load distribution. The rovers MER (NASA) and CRAB (EPFL) show good performance which is topped only by the eight wheeled DoubleSpring system

[1]  Michel Lauria.  Nouveaux concepts de locomotion pour véhicules tout-terrain robotisés , 2003 .

[2]  Paolo Fiorini.  Ground mobility systems for planetary exploration , 2000, Proceedings 2000 ICRA. Millennium Conference. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. Symposia Proceedings (Cat. No.00CH37065).

[3]  Roland Siegwart,et al.  Wheel torque control for a rough terrain rover , 2004, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2004. Proceedings. ICRA '04. 2004.

[4]  Roland Siegwart,et al.  Octopus - An Autonomous Wheeled Climbing Robot , 2002 .

[5]  Roland Siegwart,et al.  Wheel Torque Control in Rough Terrain - Modeling and Simulation , 2005, Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[6]  Robert Ivlev,et al.  The Rocky 7 rover: a Mars sciencecraft prototype , 1997, Proceedings of International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[7]  Lee F. Sword,et al.  New planetary rovers for long-range Mars science and sample return , 1998, Other Conferences.

[8]  M. G. Bekker,et al.  Theory of Land Locomotion: The Mechanics of Vehicle Mobility , 1962 .

[9]  Kikuo Fujimura,et al.  The intelligent ASIMO: system overview and integration , 2002, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[10]  Martin Grübler,et al.  Getriebelehre : Eine Theorie des Zwanglaufes und der ebenen Mechanismen , 1917 .

[11]  William Whittaker,et al.  Analytical configuration of wheeled robotic locomotion , 2001 .

[12]  Roland Siegwart,et al.  Innovative design for wheeled locomotion in rough terrain , 2002, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[13]  Roland Siegwart,et al.  SOLERO: Solar Powered Exploration Rover , 2002 .