Lunar Surface Fault-Tolerant Soft-Landing Performance and Experiment for a Six-Legged Movable Repetitive Lander

• Main Authors: Ke Yin, Songlin Zhou, Qiao Sun, Feng Gao
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-08-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: movable repetitive lander; fault-tolerant soft-landing; landing configuration; stability optimization
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/21/17/5680

The cascading launch and cooperative work of lander and rover are the pivotal methods to achieve lunar zero-distance exploration. The separated design results in a heavy system mass that requires more launching costs and a limited exploration area that is restricted to the vicinity of the immovable lander. To solve this problem, we have designed a six-legged movable repetitive lander, called “HexaMRL”, which congenitally integrates the function of both the lander and rover. However, achieving a buffered landing after a failure of the integrated drive units (IDUs) in the harsh lunar environment is a great challenge. In this paper, we systematically analyze the fault-tolerant capacity of all possible landing configurations in which the number of remaining normal legs is more than two and design the landing algorithm to finish a fault-tolerant soft-landing for the stable configuration. A quasi-incentre stability optimization method is further proposed to increase the stability margin during supporting operations after landing. To verify the fault-tolerant landing performance on the moon, a series of experiments, including five-legged, four-legged and three-legged soft-landings with a vertical landing velocity of −1.9 m/s and a payload of 140 kg, are successfully carried out on a 5-DoF lunar gravity ground-testing platform. The HexaMRL with fault-tolerant landing capacity will greatly promote the development of a next-generation lunar prober.