Landing control method of a lightweight four-legged landing and walking robot

Abstract

The prober with an immovable lander and a movable rover is commonly used to explore the Moon’s surface. The rover can complete the detection on relatively flat terrain of the lunar surface well, but its detection efficiency on deep craters and mountains is relatively low due to the difficulties of reaching such places. A lightweight four-legged landing and walking robot called “FLLWR” is designed in this study. It can take off and land repeatedly between any two sites wherever on deep craters, mountains or other challenging landforms that are difficult to reach by direct ground movement. The robot integrates the functions of a lander and a rover, including folding, deploying, repetitive landing, and walking. A landing control method via compliance control is proposed to solve the critical problem of impact energy dissipation to realize buffer landing. Repetitive landing experiments on a five-degree-of-freedom lunar gravity testing platform are performed. Under the landing conditions with a vertical velocity of 2.1 m/s and a loading weight of 140 kg, the torque safety margin is 10.3% and 16.7%, and the height safety margin is 36.4% and 50.1% for the cases with or without an additional horizontal disturbance velocity of 0.4 m/s, respectively. The study provides a novel insight into the next-generation lunar exploration equipment.

Development and implementation of a new approach for posture control of a hexapod robot to walk in irregular terrains

“…Zhao et al [22] discussed the implementation of adaptive impedance models combined with a terrain classification method in a hexapod, to walk across different terrain topologies. The usage of impedance models is also proposed by Yin et al [23] to adapt the foothold positions based on terrain cost map estimation, which reduces the torso’s oscillation during locomotion. Nonetheless, the terrain’s inclination influences the gait efficiency, and thus the torso’s orientation must be adjusted to ensure the system’s stability and improve its performance.…”

The Impact Modeling and Experimental Verification of a Launch Vehicle with Crushing-Type Landing Gear

“…The landing process of a vehicle is a complex dynamics process influenced by many factors [5][6][7]. Among them, the structural change of the system caused by buffering has an important impact on the collision behavior.…”