Development of a Small, Lightweight Rover with Elastic Wheels for Lunar Exploration

2012 ◽  
Vol 24 (6) ◽  
pp. 1031-1039 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kojiro Iizuka ◽  
◽  
Tatsuya Sasaki ◽  
Hidenori Hama ◽  
Atsuro Nishitani ◽  
...  

Rovers are one of the most important vehicles used for conducting planetary exploration missions. This paper focuses on a small, lightweight rover that can be used for lunar exploration. It should be noted that, with a small rover, it is difficult to traverse loose soil such as that on the lunar surface. The rocks that cover the lunar surface, moreover, hinder the traversal of a small, lightweight rover. We develop a small, lightweight rover having 2 configurations to solve these tasks. One configuration involves the installation of elastic wheels whose 2 form changes depending on the surface that the rover traverses. The other configuration involves passive suspension using differential gears. We perform running experiments on rovers with these configurations. Experimental results prove that elastic wheels are more efficient than rigid wheels for traversing loose soil. We also found, moreover, that the proposed rover shows good climbing performance. We thus have shown the efficiency of the proposed small, lightweight rover in this study.

1962 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 169-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Green

The term geo-sciences has been used here to include the disciplines geology, geophysics and geochemistry. However, in order to apply geophysics and geochemistry effectively one must begin with a geological model. Therefore, the science of geology should be used as the basis for lunar exploration. From an astronomical point of view, a lunar terrain heavily impacted with meteors appears the more reasonable; although from a geological standpoint, volcanism seems the more probable mechanism. A surface liberally marked with volcanic features has been advocated by such geologists as Bülow, Dana, Suess, von Wolff, Shaler, Spurr, and Kuno. In this paper, both the impact and volcanic hypotheses are considered in the application of the geo-sciences to manned lunar exploration. However, more emphasis is placed on the volcanic, or more correctly the defluidization, hypothesis to account for lunar surface features.


1994 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 127-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi Rea ◽  
George G. Ganf

Experimental results demonstrate bow small differences in depth and water regime have a significant affect on the accumulation and allocation of nutrients and biomass. Because the performance of aquatic plants depends on these factors, an understanding of their influence is essential to ensure that systems function at their full potential. The responses differed for two emergent species, indicating that within this morphological category, optimal performance will fall at different locations across a depth or water regime gradient. The performance of one species was unaffected by growth in mixture, whereas the other performed better in deep water and worse in shallow.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Daisuke Fujiwara ◽  
Naoki Tsujikawa ◽  
Tetsuya Oshima ◽  
Kojiro Iizuka

Abstract Planetary exploration rovers have required a high traveling performance to overcome obstacles such as loose soil and rocks. Push-pull locomotion rovers is a unique scheme, like an inchworm, and it has high traveling performance on loose soil. Push-pull locomotion uses the resistance force by keeping a locked-wheel related to the ground, whereas the conventional rotational traveling uses the shear force from loose soil. The locked-wheel is a key factor for traveling in the push-pull scheme. Understanding the sinking behavior and its resistance force is useful information for estimating the rover’s performance. Previous studies have reported the soil motion under the locked-wheel, the traction, and the traveling behavior of the rover. These studies were, however, limited to the investigation of the resistance force and amount of sinkage for the particular condition depending on the rover. Additionally, the locked-wheel sinks into the soil until it obtains the required force for supporting the other wheels’ motion. How the amount of sinkage and resistance forces are generated at different wheel sizes and mass of an individual wheel has remained unclear, and its estimation method hasn’t existed. This study, therefore, addresses the relationship between the sinkage and its resistance force, and we analyze and consider this relationship via the towing experiment and theoretical consideration. The results revealed that the sinkage reached a steady-state value and depended on the contact area and mass of each wheel, and the maximum resistance force also depends on this sinkage. Additionally, the estimation model did not capture the same trend as the experimental results when the wheel width changed, whereas, the model captured a relatively the same trend as the experimental result when the wheel mass and diameter changed.


2021 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 551-563
Author(s):  
Liqiong Lu ◽  
Dong Wu ◽  
Ziwei Tang ◽  
Yaohua Yi ◽  
Faliang Huang

This paper focuses on script identification in natural scene images. Traditional CNNs (Convolution Neural Networks) cannot solve this problem perfectly for two reasons: one is the arbitrary aspect ratios of scene images which bring much difficulty to traditional CNNs with a fixed size image as the input. And the other is that some scripts with minor differences are easily confused because they share a subset of characters with the same shapes. We propose a novel approach combing Score CNN, Attention CNN and patches. Attention CNN is utilized to determine whether a patch is a discriminative patch and calculate the contribution weight of the discriminative patch to script identification of the whole image. Score CNN uses a discriminative patch as input and predict the score of each script type. Firstly patches with the same size are extracted from the scene images. Secondly these patches are used as inputs to Score CNN and Attention CNN to train two patch-level classifiers. Finally, the results of multiple discriminative patches extracted from the same image via the above two classifiers are fused to obtain the script type of this image. Using patches with the same size as inputs to CNN can avoid the problems caused by arbitrary aspect ratios of scene images. The trained classifiers can mine discriminative patches to accurately identify some confusing scripts. The experimental results show the good performance of our approach on four public datasets.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hossein Ahmadvand ◽  
Fouzhan Foroutan ◽  
Mahmood Fathy

AbstractData variety is one of the most important features of Big Data. Data variety is the result of aggregating data from multiple sources and uneven distribution of data. This feature of Big Data causes high variation in the consumption of processing resources such as CPU consumption. This issue has been overlooked in previous works. To overcome the mentioned problem, in the present work, we used Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) to reduce the energy consumption of computation. To this goal, we consider two types of deadlines as our constraint. Before applying the DVFS technique to computer nodes, we estimate the processing time and the frequency needed to meet the deadline. In the evaluation phase, we have used a set of data sets and applications. The experimental results show that our proposed approach surpasses the other scenarios in processing real datasets. Based on the experimental results in this paper, DV-DVFS can achieve up to 15% improvement in energy consumption.


1993 ◽  
Vol 8 (9) ◽  
pp. 2344-2353 ◽  
Author(s):  
J-M. Berthelot ◽  
Souda M. Ben ◽  
J.L. Robert

The experimental study of wave attenuation in concrete has been achieved in the case of the propagation of plane waves in concrete rods. Different mortars and concretes have been investigated. A transmitter transducer coupled to one of the ends of the concrete rod generates the propagation of a plane wave in the rod. The receiver transducer, similar to the previous one, is coupled to the other end of the rod. The experimental results lead to an analytical expression for wave attenuation as function of the concrete composition, the propagation distance, and the wave frequency.


Robotics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 68
Author(s):  
Lei Shi ◽  
Cosmin Copot ◽  
Steve Vanlanduit

In gaze-based Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), it is important to determine human visual intention for interacting with robots. One typical HRI interaction scenario is that a human selects an object by gaze and a robotic manipulator will pick up the object. In this work, we propose an approach, GazeEMD, that can be used to detect whether a human is looking at an object for HRI application. We use Earth Mover’s Distance (EMD) to measure the similarity between the hypothetical gazes at objects and the actual gazes. Then, the similarity score is used to determine if the human visual intention is on the object. We compare our approach with a fixation-based method and HitScan with a run length in the scenario of selecting daily objects by gaze. Our experimental results indicate that the GazeEMD approach has higher accuracy and is more robust to noises than the other approaches. Hence, the users can lessen cognitive load by using our approach in the real-world HRI scenario.


1948 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 853-859
Author(s):  
R. F. A. Altman

Abstract As numerous investigators have shown, some of the nonrubber components of Hevea latex have a decided accelerating action on the process of vulcanization. A survey of the literature on this subject points to the validity of certain general facts. 1. Among the nonrubber components of latex which have been investigated, certain nitrogenous bases appear to be most important for accelerating the rate of vulcanization. 2. These nitrogen bases apparently occur partly naturally in fresh latex, and partly as the result of putrefaction, heating, and other decomposition processes. 3. The nitrogen bases naturally present in fresh latex at later stages have been identified by Altman to be trigonelline, stachhydrine, betonicine, choline, methylamine, trimethylamine, and ammonia. These bases are markedly active in vulcanization, as will be seen in the section on experimental results. 4. The nitrogenous substances formed by the decomposition processes have only partly been identified, on the one hand as tetra- and pentamethylene diamine and some amino acids, on the other hand as alkaloids, proline, diamino acids, etc. 5. It has been generally accepted that these nitrogenous substances are derived from the proteins of the latex. 6. Decomposition appears to be connected with the formation of a considerable amount of acids. 7. The production of volatile nitrogen bases as a rule accompanies the decomposition processes. These volatile products have not been identified. 8. The active nitrogen bases, either already formed or derived from complex nitrogenous substances, seem to be soluble in water but only slightly soluble in acetone.


2015 ◽  
Vol 1092-1093 ◽  
pp. 972-975
Author(s):  
Jing Yang

According to the problems exist in cyclic utilization of washing wastewater, the coagulation tests utilizing ferric trichloride (FeCl3), alums, poly aluminium chloride (PAC) and polyacrylamide (PAM) are studied, respectively. Experimental results show that PAC was much better than the other coagulants in the removal of LAS and chroma as a single coagulant. Cast 2.5mL PAC(10%) into quantitative washing wastewater, the removal rate of LAS and chroma reach 82.5% and 87.8%, respectively. When mix the every two kinds of coagulants, maintaining the same total amount of coagulant to 2.5mL, cast1.0mL PAC(10%) and 1.5mL alum (10%) into washing wastewater ,the removal rate of LAS and chroma reach 84.1% and 90.0%, respectively.


SIMULATION ◽  
1968 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 221-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
A.S. Chai

It is possible to replace k2 in a 4th-order Runge-Kutta for mula (also Nth-order 3 ≤ N ≤ 5) by a linear combination of k1 and the ki's in the last step, using the same procedure for computing the other ki's and y as in the standard R-K method. The advantages of the new method are: It re quires one less derivative evaluation, provides an error estimate at each step, gives more accurate results, and needs a minor change to switch to the RK to obtain the starting values. Experimental results are shown in verification of the for mula.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document