Design And Analysis Of Diffrential Device On Lunar Rover

With the development of deep space technology, lunar exploration presents its possibility to an increasing number of countries. Working as necessary lunar transportation tools, lunar rovers deserve sufficient research on its mobility. Differential mechanism serves to support the main structure of rovers, and is an irreplaceable part for rovers. Other favored property of differential mechanism includes smoothing main structure's attitude variation and balancing wheel pressures. The paper presents a novel geared& four-bar-linkage differential mechanism. Also presented are its schematic design, analysis and experimental research.Performance analysis on differential is carried out, validating the positive role it plays to improve the mobility of rovers. According to functional requirement of differential mechanism, three types of conceptual design are brought forward, and one is chosen through comparison to get further researched, analyzed and manufactured. Functional verification and bearing capacity experimental are carried out on differential prototype to validate the research work in this paper.To have an insight into the differential's response to rugged-terrain excitation, a six-wheeled rocker-bogie rover model is built in Matlab based on multiple-bodies dynamics and wheel-soil interaction terramechanics theory. The performance of differential mechanism during rover's approaching on representative terrains emulating various lunar environments is observed and recorded. The simulation data provides valuable reference for differential design and forms the design requirement of differential test bed.The last part of this paper is devoted to schematic design and detailed structure design of test bed. Control system and software framework are also elaborated on to implement the work of this paper.