Abstract Spherical wind-blown Tumbleweed rovers have the potential to significantly expand the type of interplanetary terrain that can be explored on planets such as Mars. Multiple tumbleweed designs have been studied by NASA’s Langley Research Center and Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and one promising design, the box-kite model, relies on internal sails to maneuver over rough terrains with the help of mass actuation within the rover chassis for directional control. This paper sets out to parametrically study the effect of actuating masses on Tumbleweed rover performance. As a first step towards evaluating the performance of a spherical Tumbleweed rover, we study a planar model in this paper. To accomplish our parametric study, a dynamic model and control scheme for a planar tumbleweed rover has been developed with four moving masses within the structure, and a prototype was built based on the model and proposed control scheme. The prototype was used to establish the validity of the dynamic model, and the dynamic model was then used to study the effect of rover diameter, mass actuation speed, and chassis-mass-to-actuating-mass ratios on the performance of the tumbleweed rover. From these studies it was found that the final angular speed of the rover decreases with increasing rover diameter, while the rover linear speed increases with diameter. The time taken to reach a desired angular speed was found to increase with increasing rover diameter for all cases. Additionally, final rover angular speed and linear speed were shown to increase with actuating-mass-to-chassis-mass ratio, and the time taken for reaching a desired angular speed and linear speed, i.e. settling time, was found to decrease with increasing actuating-mass-to-chassis-mass ratio.

中文翻译：

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平面风滚草漫游车演示器的数学建模与参数研究

摘要 球形风吹风滚草漫游车有可能显着扩大可在火星等行星上探索的行星际地形类型。NASA 的兰利研究中心和喷气推进实验室已经研究了多种风滚草设计，其中一种很有前途的设计，箱形风筝模型，依靠内部帆在漫游车底盘内的质量驱动的帮助下在崎岖的地形上进行机动以进行方向控制。本文着手参数化研究驱动质量对风滚草漫游车性能的影响。作为评估球形风滚草漫游车性能的第一步，我们在本文中研究了平面模型。为了完成我们的参数研究，一个平面风滚草漫游车的动力学模型和控制方案已经在结构内开发了四个移动质量，并基于该模型和提出的控制方案建立了原型。原型用于建立动力学模型的有效性，然后利用动力学模型研究漫游车直径、质量驱动速度和底盘质量与驱动质量比对风滚草漫游车性能的影响. 从这些研究中发现，流动站的最终角速度随着流动站直径的增加而降低，而流动站的线速度随着直径的增加而增加。在所有情况下，发现达到所需角速度所需的时间随着流动站直径的增加而增加。此外，