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Chaitanya Sonalkar, Adwait Verulkar, and Corina Sandu
There has been an interest in the exploration of planetary bodies for more than half a century. Scientific research has been focused on understanding the origins of life, potential for habitability in extraterrestrial environments, and discovery of rare minerals and energy sources. Extraterrestrial rovers have been used previously by space agencies for the exploration of Lunar and Martian surfaces. Reduced gravity on such surfaces influences the performance and mobility of extraterrestrial vehicles. Gravity can change how the soil behaves under the wheel as well as the traction force and sinkage developed by the wheel. The sinkage rate and depth of a wheel and motion resistance are also impacted by gravity. As the rovers are operated by interplanetary telemetry, autonomous real-time control is employed in these systems due to communication delays. Optimal online control with a high-fidelity terramechanics model may not be feasible and it necessitates the development of simplified models which consider the effect of reduced gravity on dynamics of a vehicle. The goal of this work is to study the effect of reduced gravity on Lunar terrain and its effect on vehicle performance of rovers through analytical modeling of tire-terrain interaction. We have developed an optimal control algorithms to improve vehicle stability and trajectory tracking performance in standard maneuvers. The simplified terrain models can also be extended for hardware-in-loop simulations.
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