One of our earlier articles (Noble and Issac, 2019) proposed a method for finding optimal wheel torques for a six-wheeled rover for two types of objective functions, namely, (a) friction requirement and (b) torque requirement. In this technical note, an approach for seeking the optimal torque of a rover when the coefficient of friction under one wheel is proposed (Noble, 2021). The approach is demonstrated for a rover climbing a large step. The solutions are verified to be a local minima by checking Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions. The solutions indicate that when the coefficient of friction available in a patch is lower than the minimum required, the other two wheels require a higher coefficient of friction than the minimum required. In cases where the available friction is higher than the minimum required, there could be situations when two wheels need to apply only very low torques, or no torques at all, for the rover to climb.
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