A novel integrated multi-modal robot through tailored mechanism design for lunar environment detection

With the rapid development of space science and technology, lunar exploration has become highly achievable. There is a growing interest in designing robots with tailored functionalities to fulfill the lunar environment detection mission. Those robots are usually expected to enable combined motion, i.e., rolling and bouncing, which can be referred to as multi-modal robots. Since the lunar environment features low gravity and high vacuum, and embraces unstructured terrain, it always poses a challenge to invent highly mobile multi-modal robots with satisfactory detection performance. In this study, we aim to develop an innovative integrated multi-modal robot with exceptional mobility and bouncing capabilities, enabled by a novel mechanism configuration, to effectively tackle complex detection tasks in the lunar environment. The main idea of the overall mechanism design is to involve an enhanced variant of the slider-crank mechanism in connection with worm gear deceleration, leading to simplicity in the robot system configuration and convenience in subsequent robot motion control. The numerical analysis is conducted to systematically assess the bouncing performance of the designed robot and its influential factors. The numerical results clearly illustrate that such novel mechanism design enables the robot with desired bouncing performance, which is further validated by experimental investigation on a prototype. The deliverable of this research can be considered as a good addition to the state-of-the-art lunar environment detection toolsets. Future prospects involve advancing both experimental and numerical approaches to effectively guide the continuous enhancement of the robot design.