Development and Evaluation of Novel Pulley Suspension Mechanism for Lunar or Planetary Exploration Rover

As an in-situ exploration way, landers and rovers are well used in lunar or planetary explorations. In lunar or planetary exploration missions, it is important to save the weight of spacecraft. Then, the authors go ahead with uniting landers and rovers. In other words, the landing device and the suspension mechanism should be commonalized. As a new mechanism for lander-rover-unite system, a novel pulley suspension mechanism is proposed. This mechanism is theoretically able to equalize the normal forces applied to wheels. The authors calls the proposed mechanism as Load Equalization Pulley Suspension mechanism (LEPS mechanism). In this paper, the detail of the design of LEPS mechanism is described and the mobility of LEPS mechanism is evaluated by way of experiments. The experiments are conducted both on a artificial ground and on a natural volcanic rudaceous terrain in Izu-oshima-island in Japan.