A hopping mechanism which utilize a resonance and functional materials for small rover
- Paper number
IAC-09.A3.I.5
- Author
Dr. Yoshiki Sugawara, Kwansei Gakuin University, Japan
- Coauthor
Prof. Nobuyuki Kobayashi, Kwansei Gakuin University, Japan
- Coauthor
Mr. Kou Mizuguchi, Kwansei Gakuin University, Japan
- Year
2009
- Abstract
Several asteroid rovers have been sent to asteroids and exploration of Itokawa has showed prominent results in recent year. And sometimes such an exploration includes landing mission of asteroid rover and it is expected that they brings a lot of significant results than only remote observations from the orbit. But it is not easy to make the rover to land and explore the surface of the asteroid successfully because such an astral body like the asteroid has two special features which may cause the rover some critical failures. One feature is that there is no air and it induces a vacuum metalizing of the metal slide member. The other feature is that their gravity is usually quite small and it induces a bad controllability especially for the rover with wheels which require enough frictional force between ground and wheels. Therefore, it is preferable for rovers to use hopping mechanism without slide member. To realize a such kind of hopping mechanism, we have proposed a hopping procedure which utilize the resonance of flexible element and hardening of the stiffness of the flexible element. Only a resonance of the flexible element results in insufficient energy and insufficient height of the hopping because the energy reaches to a certain amount which enables the system to take off the ground before the energy which is required to hop to desired height is stored. In the proposed hopping procedure, the stiffness of the flexible element is hardened during resonance and it enables the leap of the energy and the improvement of the hopping height. Moreover, to harden the stiffness of the flexible element, an application of the functional material has been proposed and one idea which uses a piezoelectric element has been introduced based on the proposed procedure and the validity of the system has been proved by numerical analysis. However, the parametric dependence of the system and the experimental validation has not been carried out yet. In the research, we carry out a detail analysis of the proposed hopping procedure and illustrate the relations between the parameters and specifications for the hopping. Furthermore, other feasibilities which utilize the other functional materials are investigated. Finally, some fundamental experiments of the proposed idea in the case of piezoelectric element are shown and its tangible application as the rover is analyzed, e.g. the method of horizontal locomotion and so on.
- Abstract document
- Manuscript document
(absent)