Comprehensive Locomotion Performance Evaluation of All-Terrain Robots

Author

Thueer, Thomas ; Krebs, Ambroise ; Siegwart, Roland

Author_Institution

Autonomous Syst. Lab., Swiss Fed. Inst. of Technol., Zurich

fYear

2006

fDate

9-15 Oct. 2006

Firstpage

4260

Lastpage

4265

Abstract

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

Keywords

mobile robots; planetary rovers; suspensions (mechanical components); torque; wheels; CRAB rover; MER rover; all-terrain robots; eight wheeled DoubleSpring system; locomotion performance evaluation; suspension system; wheel torques; Actuators; Analytical models; Friction; Intelligent robots; Measurement; Mobile robots; NASA; Orbital robotics; Remotely operated vehicles; Wheels; All-Terrain Robots; Locomotion Systems; Robot Design; Rover; Space Robotics;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2006 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on

Conference_Location

Beijing

Print_ISBN

1-4244-0258-1

Electronic_ISBN

1-4244-0259-X

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IROS.2006.281954

Filename

4059081