Abstract
Planetary rovers that explore surface of the Moon or Mars easily slip in both longitudinal and lateral directions because it is covered with fine-grained sand. Particularly, when rovers traverse lateral slopes, the side slip occurs significantly. In the worst case, the rovers may deviate significantly on the slopes, and there is a possibility that fails to planetary exploration. To mitigate the slippage problems, we have confirmed in our previous research that the side slip of a rover is able to be reduced by changing the attitude of the rover. In order to study further the traversal behavior of a rover, in this research, we developed a dynamics simulator that includes a wheel-soil interaction model based on terramechanics on slope. To validate the simulator, we conducted numerical simulations for slope-traversing scenarios and compared the results with those of experiments. According to the comparison, the simulation results qualitatively match the tendencies of experimental results in the most cases and thus verify the usefulness of the simulator.
