Abstract
Lunar and planetary explorations have been increasingly planned across the world where mobility on the planetary/lunar surface is needed. In this paper we propose a new type of very small rover - typically with the weight of less than 2kg. Several new ideas are proposed: simplified locomotion mechanism with elastic wheels, extremely small fish-eye camera system, light-weight extension system using shape-memory alloy and tiny observation probe for investigating a hole connected to a lunar lava tube. In this paper, we focus on small typed wheels, especially the running performance of elastic wheels. As first step to develop lunar mobile rovers with high performance, we carried out the experiments (to measure deflection and travesabily loose soil and steppability of proposed elastic wheels). From these results, we confirmed the effect of the elastic wheels.
