Abstract
In recent years, such small body exploration missions as asteroids or comets have received remarkable attention in the world. In small body explorations, especially, detailed in-situ surface exploration by tiny rover is one of effective and fruitful means and is expected to make strong contributions towards scientific studies. Performance of mobility on surface explorer is highly dependent on the gravitational environment. Some researchers have proposed novel locomotion mechanisms for extremely small terrestrial bodies like asteroids. Hopping is a possible method under micro-gravity. It is not proved, however, that the proposed method of locomotion is optimum for a given level of gravity. The purpose of this paper is to analyze which level of gravity is optimum for each mechanism, and which mechanism or parameter is optimum for each level of gravity. This paper discusses classification of locomotion mechanism. This paper compares the speed of hopping and wheeled robots and some simulation studies are performed to analyze the detailed mobility of wheeled robots.
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Kubota, T., Takahashi, K., Shimoda, S., Yoshimitsu, T., Nakatani, I. (2009). Locomotion Mechanism of Intelligent Unmanned Explorer for Deep Space Exploration. In: Budiyono, A., Riyanto, B., Joelianto, E. (eds) Intelligent Unmanned Systems: Theory and Applications. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 192. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00264-9_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00264-9_2
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