Study on SMA driven hopper design for planetary exploration

Abstract

This paper studies the feasibility of a hopper for planetary exploration rovers. The proposed hopper is designed based on shape memory alloy(SMA) actuators, because SMA actuators are light in mass compared with traditional electric motors. This paper discusses a design strategy for the proposed hopper to achieve sufficient locomotion capability on planetary surface. Firstly, this paper presents a basic hopper mechanism and its design strategy with SMA physical model. Secondly, semi-optimized design parameters of the hopper are determined based on brute-force searching. Finally, the experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed hopper for lunar or planetary exploration.

Keywords

• planetary exploration
• shape memory alloy actuator
• hopping robot
• mobile robot