7 accepted papers
This paper present a spiral-cavity wheel for lunar regolith excavation and a sensor-light evaluation stack that jointly estimates fill ratio (vision), sinkage (vision), and specific energy from actuator logs. In benchtop tests (four revolutions at 5, 10, and 15 RPM) against two literature baselines,…
Exploration of steep and irregular terrains, such as lunar caves and vertical rock faces, requires free-climbing robots capable of identifying and securely grasping natural handholds. This study introduced SureGrip, a novel framework for detecting handholds and evaluating grasp quality in freeclimbi…
This paper presents the modeling and analysis of a novel moving mechanism "tumbling" for asteroid exploration. The system actuation is provided by an internal motor and torque wheel; elastic spring-mounted spikes are attached to the perimeter of a circular-shaped robot, protruding normal to the surf…
In this letter, we present a passive spine gripper that can hold rough rocky surfaces of boulders on cliff walls, and we discuss its application to a four-limbed robot for free-climbing in extreme terrain. The limbed robot has four degrees of freedom in each limb, where three are to drive joints of
A wheeled mobile robot traveling on loose soil has wheels with grousers (i.e., lugs) on their surface to improve its mobility performance. Although previous studies have analysis and modeling of the mobility performance of a wheel with grousers, most of them did not cover the stress distribution of
The surface of a minor body in space features a harsh terrain and microgravity. To explore such surfaces in detail, a robot with an appropriate moving mechanism is required. To this end, we proposed a robot that moves by gripping the surface like a rock climber. We focus on the robot's gait, where t
Owing to the irregular terrain and microgravity environment of an asteroid, an appropriate locomotion mechanism is required for exploring the asteroid by a robot. In this paper, a ground grip locomotive robot is proposed. One of the most important requirements of the robot is the development of the…