It is not easy for asteroid landers to move on the surface of asteroids because such an astral body has two special features. One feature is that there is no air and it induces vacuum metalizing of metal slide components. The other feature is that their quite small gravity induces bad controllability of landers with wheels which require enough frictional force between ground and wheels. Therefore, it is preferable for landers to use jumping mechanism without metal slide component. In this paper, a jumping mechanism is proposed and the jumping is induced by stiffness switching of a spring-mass system during resonant oscillation. Stiffness switching of proposed mechanism corresponds to addition of potential energy and such an additional energy causes an effective jumping phenomenon. To switch stiffness with high reliability, one jumping mechanism is proposed and it consists of main body, tip mass, flexible beam with a piezoelectric element and external circuit connected to piezoelectric element. In the mechanism, the stiffness of the system is switched electrically and it shows advantage in the point of reliability. To validate the proposed mechanism, numerical analysis is carried out and feasibilities of application for asteroid landers are studied.
展开▼
