The Mechanical Design And Path Planning Of Spherical Lunar Exploration Robot

With the rapid development of science and technology, the robot especially the mobile robot is growing gradually. Spherical robot is a kind of mobile robot with a fully-enclosed spherical or spheroid housing. The spherical robot is characterized by agile motion, it can both roll in any direction and turn with zero radius, moreover resume stability even if a collision happened with the other obstacles. So it is very suitable to be used in these environments, such as industrial building, civil application, defense construction and space exploration domain.The research is sourced from the project of Education Ministry (Project No:708011). This thesis took the development of spherical mobile robot as the research background, and researched the key technologies of spherical lunar exploration robot.The following aspects are contained in this dissertation:Firstly, the whole robot was divided into three sub-systems, including the motion driving system, the manipulator system and the open spheroid system. By comparing the optional design of those three sub-systems separately, the final design was decided, and the specific parameters were designed by the estimating-adjusting way.Secondly, the thesis researched on kinematics models and dynamics models of the robot. On the one hand, the kinematics models were made on condition that the robot's motion was equivalent to movement of the spheroid, and omni-directional flexibility of the robot was analyzed. On the other hand, this thesis developed rectilinear motion and simplified curve motion dynamic models by using Newton-Euler method, the simulation was finished for the model.Thirdly, to analyze the ability to climb slope obstacle, the thesis developed the motion equation when the robot was climbing slope obstacle, and two extreme conditions were given basing on angle and driving torque. The analysis was verified by simulating with ADAMS.Finally, the phenomenon of local minimum can be caused when the robot implements path planning under traditional Artificial Potential Field (APF) method, therefore, Simulated Annealing and Geometry Information were introduced, the problem of destination unreachable was solved.