Folding Study on the Multi-constrain Quadrilateral Suspension of Six-wheeled Rover

Abstract

Abstract. Based on the suspension structure, this paper develops some methods to describe the change of links and kinematic pairs during the folding process of the suspension. Employing these methods, the increase and decrease of links and pairs, as well as the change of pairs' feature can be demonstrated clearly. An idea is proposed to obtain a large number of folding schemes for the suspension. On the basis of this idea, one mechanism is decomposed into some basic kinematic chains firstly and then these chains (with folding function) are fused to form one complete mechanism. As the application of proposed methods, the suspension, which is shown in this study, is divided into three basic kinematic chains and many reasonable folding schemes for each chain are obtained. Through fusion operation, a number of folding configurations for the rover are achieved. At the end of this paper, we present several generally accepted constrain conditions to compare the obtained schemes, and one folding scheme with the best folded-deployable performance is chosen.