Development of Crawler Robot with Pile Units to Traverse Loose Soil with Steep Slope

Abstract

Rovers are the most important devices for planetary exploration. Rovers are required to traverse many situation of ground, on various form’s stones, loose soil, steep slope etc. There are some technologies that large obstacles such as stones can be avoided by using cameras or lasers. However, it is extremely difficult for rovers to traverse loose soil, especially “loose soil with steep slope”. If the area being traversed is sloped, these rovers might not work. During a lunar exploration mission, rovers must be able to traverse slopes. Lunar surfaces are mainly characterized by loose soil called regolith, and the ground is very steep around craters. We developed a crawler robot to adapt such condition. Proposed rover has an ability to traverse loose soil with steep slope. It is to use the shearing strength of soil. This means that we use characteristic of soil that the shearing strength of deeply soil areas was very strong compared with surface of ground. If the rovers can make use of the deep area of loose soil, they may be able to support their weight on slopes with loose soil. Therefore, we employ piles to penetrate into the deep area of loose soil. We combined the crawler robot and piles units. The experimental results are shown the high performance of the proposed crawler robot with piles units on uneven ground and loose soil.