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Frontiers of Mechanical Engineering >> 2022, Volume 17, Issue 4 doi: 10.1007/s11465-022-0707-1

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

1. School of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China;2. Key Laboratory of Mechanical System and Vibration, School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China;1. School of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China;2. Key Laboratory of Mechanical System and Vibration, School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China;2. Key Laboratory of Mechanical System and Vibration, School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China

Received: 2022-03-15 Available online: 2022-03-15

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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.

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