Analysis of Motion Control for a Quadruped Ground-Gripping Robot for Minor Body Exploration on Uneven Terrain

Abstract

The exploration of minor bodies, such as asteroids and comets using robotics is a necessary step for the study of the Solar System's evolutionary process. For such purpose, a multi-legged ground-gripping robot was proposed to perform precise locomotion towards specific places of interest. Moreover, stable locomotion is expected, since this robot has grippers capable of grasping the rocky and uneven terrain of the minor bodies, maintaining the attachment to the ground and preventing the flotation of the robot on the microgravity environment. Decreasing the forces induced on the grippers is essential to keep the stable locomotion in such environments and, in this paper, a gait control method is proposed to reduce accelerations and motion reactions on the robot, avoiding high reaction forces on the contact points with the ground. This method focuses on generating trajectories to be traveled by parts of the robot. A numerical simulation was developed to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed method in decreasing reactions on the robot during the motion of the robot on uneven terrains by comparing different trajectories' parameters.