Design and Control of TAWL—A Wheel-Legged Rover With Terrain-Adaptive Wheel Speed Allocation Capability

Abstract

This article presents the design, control, and implementation of a novel four-legged rover for planetary exploration. A novel active-passive coupled leg mechanism is proposed for the design of the planetary rover. Then, based on the design of the actuator and leg mechanism, the novel wheel-legged robotic system is developed. Furthermore, the kinematic model of the robot is established and then a kinematics-based control strategy is presented, incorporating roll-and-pitch control, contact force control, wheel speed allocation, and steering modules. Experiments are carried out on regular indoor terrain and irregular outdoor terrain. The variations of rover attitude angles and contact forces in regular terrain decrease by more than 90% and 60%, respectively. In the outdoor environment, rover attitude angles are regulated within 1 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">o</sup> and variations of contact forces are reduced by more than half. In addition, the proposed control strategy decreases the slippage on hard unstructured terrain by almost half. Finally, the robustness and failure responses of the robot are investigated, which are also verified by simulations and experiments.