火星探査ローバを想定した弾性車輪の研究

抄録

Rover's traveling systems are required to high traveling performance on rough terrain. In particular, focuses to travel on sand, stacks tends to occur to use rigid wheels. Therefore, it is effective to use flexible wheels that can increase the ground contact area according to supporting load, compact the soil by front of the wheel, and travel not to shear-break the soil with small bearing pressure as uniform as possible.

In this study, we propose and prototype the flexible wheels as a traveling system suitable for Mars environment. In addition, we report the results of the traveling performance from a experiment using the prototype wheels and 4-wheeled experimental rover without suspension mechanism.