An Adaptive Chain-type Treadmill-Based Traction Testbed for the Wheeled Planetary Exploration Rover: Design, Modeling and Experimental Validation

摘要

This paper present a novel chain-type treadmill-based traction testbed for the wheeled planetary exploration rover. The main objective of this work is to develop a customized testing system executing traction loading to the rover body together with drag torque loading to the individual wheels, providing a synthetic evaluation of the mobility performance of the Mar rover platform. The overall system is composed of a traction loading subsystem to perform the task of traction loading and six modular chain-type treadmill subsystems to provide the drag torques. In order to improve the loading precision onto the target objects of the rover, an adaptive loading control strategy with friction compensation is proposed to satisfy the tailored loading requirements of individual rover wheels as well as the rover body. Finally, the comprehensive experiments of a planetary exploration rover prototype including the synchronous motion tracking, the traction capacity testing as well as the varied wheel drag torque loading are implemented to validate the effectiveness of the devised testbed.