Terrain-Adaptive Grouser Wheel for Optimal Planetary Exploration: Design and Experimental Investigation
Terrain-Adaptive Grouser Wheel for Optimal Planetary Exploration: Design and Experimental Investigation
This paper introduces GROVER, a wheel capable of continuously adjusting its grouser height to adapt to varying terrains. Across 950 trials on vinyl, coarse rock, pea gravel, and sand, the system reduced slip by 34.6%–58.0% in granular terrains and improved travel time and energy consumption by up to 77.4%.
The study presents GROVER, a multimodal wheel with actuated grousers that adapt height during traversal to reduce slip and energy consumption across varying terrains, validated through 950 trials in both laboratory and field settings.
Source: arXiv Robotics — research abstracts · Read original article ↗
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Publisher-reported claims, with original evidence. These results have not been independently verified by RoboSignal.
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trials
950
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remain largely unexplored. Grousers are a compelling feature to actuate, as granular terrains tend to require increased grouser height for improved wheel performance. As a result, we introduce GROVER, a multimodal wheel capable of continuously adjusting its grouser height for terrain adaptation. Fixed-height performance was characterized on vinyl, coarse rock, pea gravel, and sand under two packing states. Across 950
Open source S3trials for instructed terrain transition
20 trials
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slip configuration during motion, with slip decreasing by $44.0\pm4.7\%$ from the transient peak across 20 trials. Second, an online adaptation routine used closed-loop slip feedback alone to search the grouser-height range for a lower-slip configuration on four terrains with previously uncharacterized granularities: three field terrains and one laboratory regolith terrain. The controller selected different heights,
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remain largely unexplored. Grousers are a compelling feature to actuate, as granular terrains tend to require increased grouser height for improved wheel performance. As a result, we introduce GROVER, a multimodal wheel capable of continuously adjusting its grouser height for terrain adaptation. Fixed-height performance was characterized on vinyl, coarse rock, pea gravel, and sand under two packing states. Across 950
Open source S3
trials, the best configuration varied with terrain, reducing slip by 34.6\%--58.0\% in granular terrains and improving travel time and energy consumption by up to 77.4\%. No single grouser height minimized slip across all terrains, motivating mid-traversal reconfiguration toward lower-slip operation. Two experiments demonstrated this. First, an instructed terrain transition changed grouser height toward a known low-
Open source S4
slip configuration during motion, with slip decreasing by $44.0\pm4.7\%$ from the transient peak across 20 trials. Second, an online adaptation routine used closed-loop slip feedback alone to search the grouser-height range for a lower-slip configuration on four terrains with previously uncharacterized granularities: three field terrains and one laboratory regolith terrain. The controller selected different heights,
Open source S5
with settled slip 25.4\%--37.2\% lower than the pre-settled mean. Together, these results demonstrate GROVER's ability to improve mobility by varying wheel morphology during traversal toward lower-slip operating states.
Open source S6
Source：arXiv Robotics — research abstracts · arxiv.org