Abstract

The path following control strategies for a six-wheel lunar rover under loose soil terrains were proposed after building the rover sideslip model, as well as the sideslip and slippage model of each wheel. The design of controller was done using the prior layered hierarchical architecture. The path following control level only considered the sideslip of rover. The inner control level took the sideslip and slip of each wheel as corrections to the inverse kinematics of the rover, which is helpful to prevent the rover from losing traction performance caused by excessive wheel slippage. Several path following control simulations were conducted under different kinds of soft terrain conditions. Simulation patent results show that the proposed path following control method can guarantee the traction performance and provide favorable control effects.

Keywords: Automatic control technology, control strategy, inverse kinematics model, layered hierarchical architecture, lunar rover, loose soil terrains, path following, sideslip, terramechanics, six-wheel, system identification.