DISCUSSION ON MODELING OF LUGGED WHEEL CONSIDERING EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF TRAVERSABILITY FOR SOFT GROUND TRAVEL

摘要

The planetary rovers have a wheel mechanism in many cases because it is a simple structure and easily mounted on the rover. However, since soft soils cover on planetary surfaces, the wheel easily slips and gets stuck. In order to prevent an increase of a slip and a stuck, a surface of the wheel has lugs that are ridges to improve the wheel traction. Researchers have been studying about an influence of a lug. However, a design method of an effective lug has never studied well yet. Purpose of this research is to model the design method of the effective lugs. In order to model the design method, a lugged wheel model was proposed regarding the variation of shear characteristics and a shear radius. In this paper, a single wheel experiment was performed to verify the traversability of the lugged wheel and the validity of the proposed lugged wheel model was discussed considering the results of the experiments. In the result, there is some modification to formulate the traversability in the proposed model. Thus the lugged wheel model was improved considering the performance of the wheel traversability, and the traversability of simulation results indicated the same trend of the experimental results.