Choosing the Best Locomotion Mode in Reconfigurable Rovers
Open accessAbstract
The use of autonomous rovers for planetary exploration is crucial to traverse long distances and perform new discoveries on other planets. One of the most important issues is related to the interaction between the rover wheel and terrain, which would help to save energy and even avoid getting entrapped. The use of reconfigurable rovers with different locomotion modes has demonstrated improvement of traction and energy consumption. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to determine the best locomotion mode during the rover traverse, based on simple parameters, which would be obtained from propioceptive sensors. For this purpose, interaction of different terrains have been modelled and analysed with the ExoTeR, a scale prototype rover of the European ExoMars 2020 mission. This rover is able to perform, among others, the wheel walking locomotion mode, which has been demonstrated to improve traction in different situations. Currently, it is difficult to decide the instant time the rover has to switch from this locomotion mode to another. This paper also proposes a novel method to estimate the slip ratio, useful for deciding the best locomotion mode. Finally, results are obtained from an immersive simulation environment. It shows how each locomotion mode is suitable for different terrains and slopes and the proposed method is able to estimate the slip ratio.
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Direct commanding is limited by the latency present in communications when the rover is placed on another planet, preventing direct teleoperation, and thus autonomous rovers are desired.
“Direct commanding is limited by the latency present in communications when the rover is placed on another planet. This fact prevents the use of direct teleoperation, and thus autonomous rovers are desired. 219”
From Energy system and resource utilization in space: A state-of-the-art review (2024) · cites this paper as [219]
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- Authors
- Pérez del Pulgar Mancebo, C. J., Romeo Manrique, P., Paz Delgado, G. J., Sánchez Ibáñez, J. R., & Azkarate, M.
- Affiliations
- Department of Systems Engineering and Automation, Universidad de Málaga, Andalucía Tech, 29071 Málaga, Spain
- European Space Agency (ESA-ESTEC), 2201 AZ Noordwijk, The Netherlands
- Venue
- Electronics
- Publisher
- MDPI AG
- Published
- 2019-07-22
- Volume
- 8
- Issue
- 7
- Pages
- 818
- ISSN
- 2079-9292 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2963037398
- Cited by
- 6
- References
- 36
- Citations by year
- 2025: 1 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 1 · 2021: 1
- FWCI
- 0.37
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- dx.doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Electronics (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Funders
- European Space Agency (4000118072/16/NL/LvH/gp)
- Universidad de Málaga (Entorno de Simulación Inmersivo)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Civil and Structural Engineering › Soil Mechanics and Vehicle Dynamics
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Control and Systems Engineering › Control and Dynamics of Mobile Robots
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Aerospace Engineering › Robotics and Sensor-Based Localization
- Keywords
- wheel-terrain interaction, traction, energy consumption, ExoMars 2020, planetary rovers, terrain modeling, immersive simulation, proprioceptive sensors
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