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A method for traction ability research of a rover wheel on mixed planet terrain with movable stones - EurekAlert

The Chang'e-6/7/8 exploration mission has been announced officially by China recently, and the international lunar and Mars research station plans will be carried out within the 2030s. It can be predicted that China's future lunar and Mars surface exploration activities will last longer, have a larger exploration range, and have a more complex terrain to traverse and explore, which will pose severe challenges to the working performance of the planet rover and its adaptability to the planet surface environment. One of the key problems will be to study the relationship between the mechanical properties of planet soil and the traction performance of the planet rover’s wheels. The mixed terrains of terramechanics research are mainly composed of static stones and loose soil. Whereas, the movement behavior of stones is often ignored while analyzing the influence of the wheel’s traction performance caused by mixed terrain. Since the existing theory explaining the terramechanics problem of the planetary vehicle’s wheel moving in the mixed terrain of movable stones and loose soil is imperfect and its calculation is relatively complex, the new solution of contact force of the wheel of a planetary rover under the mixed terrain of a movable stone and loose soil is worthy of research. In a research paper recently published in Space: Science & Technology, Jiangshan Du and Tieqiu Huang, from Beijing Jiaotong University, aiming at these problems, propose a residual soil model for solving the interaction force between the remaining soil that is not covered by stones and wheel and a plastic homogeneous soil mechanics model to calculate the soil force supplied to a movable stone.

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