Design And Research On Cushioning Performance Of Metal Elastic Wheel For Mars Rover

Wheeled rover is the only successful mobile platform for deep space exploration.For Mars exploration,wheeled rover is still the basic mobile platform.The only part of the contacting ground is the wheel.The wheel plays a decisive role in the performance of the rover.The object of this research is part of the wheel.In view of the rugged topography of Mars surface,it is necessary to have good cushioning performance.In this paper,two kinds of metal elastic wheels are designed.The design of bionic elastic wheel use bionics method.In order to pinecone as biological prototype,the external contour and the scale curve are extracted as the reference for wheel design.The wheel of the elastic spoke wheel is designed by calculating the constant proportion relation between the circle and the ellipse in the changing process.The simulation of the static pressure of the elastic wheel is carried out by using the finite element software ABAQUS to determine the load and deformation data of the wheel.The analysis shows that The contacting ground has no significant influence on the bearing characteristics of elastic wheels;the bevel distance of bionic elastic wheel is 2°,the bevel distance of elastic spoke wheel is 2°-4°;thickness of wheel sheet is 0.4mm-0.5mm for bionic elastic wheel,thickness of wheel spokes is 0.3mm for elastic spoke wheel.After determining the structural and dimensions of the wheels,the final wheel model is obtained by different processing methods.The quality of the three wheels as follows:the quality of rigid wheel is 1.09 kg;the quality of elastic spoke wheel is 1.12kg;and the quality of the bionic elastic wheel is 0.98kg.After the wheel being finished,respectively,static pressure test,model car obstacle crossing test and soil bin test is carried out for the wheel.The Load and buffer performance of the wheel is studied by means of experiments.The bearing characteristic curve and equation of the elastic wheel are obtained by means of pressure test.Taking the load on the wheel,the height and width of obstacle as the test factors,the model car obstacle crossing test is carried out.Experimental results show:the impact of obstacle height on the cushioning performance of elastic wheel is more significant;the width of obstacle has an influence on the cushioning performance of the bionic elastic wheel;the peak acceleration of the elastic spoke wheel is 75%smaller than that of the rigid wheel and the peak acceleration of the bionic elastic wheel is 87.5%smaller than that of the rigid wheel.It is proved that the elastic wheel is more stable than the rigid wheel test and the bionic elastic wheel has better motion stability between the elastic wheels by the soil bin.