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 Parent-Child Type Planetary Rover "SMC Rover" and Arm-Equipped Single Wheel Rover "Uni-Rover" |
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(1997-) As one of the main research subjects of COE/TITech Super Mechano-System project, we have been studying a heterogeneous planetary rover system composed of decentralized autonomous agents (child rovers) and a leader agent (parent unit) as shown in Fig.1.
This rover system called "SMC Rover" consists of one main body (parent unit) and multiple detachable wheel units (child units). The main body contains central control system, solar battery cells, communication devices and so on. Each detachable unit, consisting of a single manipulator mounted on a wheel, is called "Uni-Rover" (Fig.2 and 3).
The main body cannot move by itself, but the Uni-Rovers hold the main body by their arms and act as active wheels of the main body. And then, if it is necessary, each Uni-Rover separates from the main body and move around to undergo separate missions by themselves as child rovers.
The Uni-Rover moves around on the external planets by taking the posture as shown in Fig.3 (a). On the rough terrain, rovers should have as much large wheels as possible to overcome obstacles. The Uni-Rover is ideal from this viewpoint. The arm of the Uni-Rover support the torque reaction of the driving wheel while moving and it also acts as the steering device by changing the direction of the caster mounted on the tip of the arm. The Uni-Rover also can work with manipulator by adopting the posture of Fig.2 (b). The transformation between the locomotion mode and the manipulation mode is done by arm operation. Furthermore, a new method of trajectory modeling and steering control optimization for the Uni-Rover is discussed by using the relationship between arm posture and turning radius.
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Fig.3 Mechanism of the Uni-Rover
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Fig.4 Uni-Rover in combined locomotion mode
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References:
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- S.Hirose, "Super-Mechano-Colony and SMC Rover with Detachable Wheel Units", Proc. COE workshop '99, pp.67-72 (1999)
- Shigeo Hirose, Riichiro Damoto, Atsushi Kawakami : Study of Super-Mechano-Colony (Design of Experimental Model and Its Fundamental Experiments) Proc. COE workshop 2000, pp.83-89 (2000)
- R. Damoto, A. Kawakami and S. Hirose, "Study of Super-Mechano Colony : concept and basic experimental set-up", Advanced Robotics, 15 ,4, pp.391-408 (2001)
- A. Kawakami, A. Torii and S. Hirose, "Design of SMC Rover: Development and Basic Experiments of Arm Equipped Single Wheel Rover", Proc. IEEE/RSJ IROS (2001)
- Atsushi Kawakami, Akinori Torii, Kazuhiro Motomura, Shigeo Hirose, “SMC Rover : Planetary Rover with Transformable Wheels”, Proc. of SICE Annual Conference, pp391-396 (2002)
- A.Kawakami, A.Torii, K.Motomura, and Shigeo Hirose, “SMC Rover : Planetary Rover with Transformable wheels”, Experimental Robotics VIII, Advanced Robotics Series, Bruno Siciliano Ed. Springer, pp498-506 (2003)
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