Planetary Rovers fitted with Omni-Directional / Mecanum Wheels

Kurzfassung

The paper describes the principal results of a study into the use of omni-directional wheels, in particular Mecanum wheels, for application to extra-terrestrial rovers. Omni-directional wheels have been applied to vehicles operating over smooth, flat surfaces but no work appears to have been done in connection with the performance of such vehicles fitted with these wheels when traversing the extremely rough, and soft and hard surface terrains to be found on Mars, the Moon, or even on Earth. The object of the study was, therefore, the design and testing of an omni-directional wheel for “cross-country” use. A Mecanum wheel and a plain tread calibration wheel were built and evaluated using the Martian soil simulant testbed located at ESA’s facilities at ESTEC. The wheel tests showed that Mecanum wheels can be used to provide the rover with omni-directional manoeuvring capability on Mars soil simulant. In addition, a small rover equipped with Mecanum wheels was built to test the behaviour of a “real” vehicle with this type of wheel on very rough terrestrial terrain. These tests showed that such a rover can meet the demands of Mars and Moon exploration and high-lighted other manoeuvring capabilities that could not be evaluated with the ESTEC test-bed.