【国际版】这种轮胎的设定，必将是未来星球探索的利器！

CR讲师招募通道

英文版正文727字，

预计阅读时长8分钟

中文版正文1056字，

预计阅读时长10分钟

Eleven years ago, the Spirit rover was noodling around in Gusev Crater on Mars when it drove over a thin hard crust of soil and broke through into a layer of soft sand underneath. The rover was already a little bit hobbled (understandable, since Spirit was something like 2,000 days into what was originally planned as a 90-day mission), and after months of trying, it became clear that Spirit wasn’t likely to move again. Unable to reach a position where its solar panels could be tilted toward the sun, Spirit froze to death during the Martian winter.

11年前，勇气号火星车在火星上的古塞夫火山口闲逛时，它驶过一层薄而硬的土壤外壳，冲破了下面的一层软沙。漫游者已经有点步履蹒跚了（可以理解，因为勇气号在最初计划只有90天任务，后来大约有2000天），经过几个月的尝试，很明显勇气号不太可能再移动了。由于无法到达其太阳能电池板可能向太阳倾斜的位置，勇气号在火星的冬天‘‘冻死’’了。

Larger rovers like Curiosity don’t have to worry about solar power, but getting stuck in soft surfaces is still a concern, since the options for getting a rover unstuck are limited—all you’ve really got to work with is the rover’s own mobility system.

像好奇号这样的大型漫游者不必担心太阳能，但被卡在柔软的表面仍然是一个问题，因为让漫游者脱钩的选择是有限的，你真正需要做的是漫游者自己的移动系统。

In a paper published recently， in Science Robotics, researchers from Georgia Tech’s CRAB Lab led by Professor Daniel Goldman describe how they’ve worked with a NASA rover design to enable new mobility behaviors with actuated wheels that can avoid getting stuck. How do the wheels do that? By wiggling.

在最近发表在《科学机器人学》上的一篇论文中，来自佐治亚理工大学螃蟹实验室的研究人员在丹尼尔·戈德曼教授的带领下描述了他们是如何与美国宇航局的一个探测器设计一起工作的，该设计通过驱动轮来实现新的移动行为，从而避免被卡住。轮子是怎么做到的？全靠扭。

That full-size RP15 rover was a testbed for the Resource Prospector rover, which was going to do some exploring of potentially icy parts of Earth’s moon in 2022. Resource Prospector was cancelled in 2018, and then some of what it was going to do was resurrected as part of the VIPER lunar rover. But VIPER’s wheel system is quite different. The RP15 prototype uses a four-wheel design, but the wheels are on a sort of actuated suspension system that allows them to move up and down and forward and backward as well as rotating around the vertical axis. All of these degrees of freedom mean that the wheels can do things that the Mars rovers, with their rocker bogie suspensions, just can’t.

全尺寸RP15探测器是资源勘探者探测器的试验台，它将在2022年对地球月球可能结冰的部分进行一些探测。“资源探矿者”号在2018年被取消，随后它将要做的一些事情作为“毒蛇”号月球车的一部分复活。但是毒蛇的轮子系统是完全不同的。RP15原型车采用了四轮设计，但车轮采用了一种驱动悬挂系统，可以上下前后移动，也可以绕垂直轴旋转。所有这些自由度意味着轮子可以做火星漫游者，用他们的摇杆转向架悬挂，来完成不能做的事情。

No matter how many degrees of freedom your robot has, they’re not going to be all that useful unless you can get them to work in a coordinated manner towards a specific goal. Georgia Tech’s Mini Rover is a scaled down version of RP15 that uses the same wheel kinematics, allowing for testing of those degrees of freedom at smaller scale. The idea is finding the best way of moving a rover forward in granular terrain—poppy seeds, in the scaled down version. Effective gaits, as is turns out, are fairly complicated:

不管你的机器人有多大的自由度，它们都不会那么有用，除非你能让它们以协调的方式朝着一个特定的目标工作。佐治亚理工的Mini Rover是一个缩小版的RP15，使用相同的车轮运动学，允许测试这些自由度在较小的规模。这个想法是找到一个最佳的方式，在颗粒地形罂粟种子，在缩小版本的漫游车前进。事实证明，有效的步态相当复杂。

The researchers are well aware that the likelihood of NASA sending a rover somewhere with a surface that consists of poppy seeds is not very high, and that “planetary regolith is often very cohesive and polydisperse.” Yeah, that. Future research will mix up (literally and figuratively) the kinds of terrain that the Mini Rover will be tested in, and continue gait validation on NASA’s fuller-size RP15 rover.

研究人员很清楚，美国国家航空航天局（NASA）将一艘探测器送至表面由罂粟种子组成的某处的可能性并不是很大，而且“行星表面的风化层通常具有很强的凝聚力和多分散性。”。未来的研究将混合（字面上和比喻上）迷你探测器将要测试的地形类型，并继续在美国宇航局更大尺寸的RP15探测器上进行步态验证。

Unfortunately, VIPER won’t benefit from the kinds of gaits being developed here, but other rovers, like the European Space Agency and Roscosmos’ Rosalind Franklin rover (which is scheduled to head to Mars in 2022) does have additional degrees of freedom in its mobility system. And longer term, the Georgia Tech researchers are hoping that what they learn will inform future rover designs, allowing them to explore more interesting places without stressing their creators out quite so much.

不幸的是，VIPER不会从这里开发的各种步态中受益，但其他的漫游者，如欧洲航天局和Roscosmos的Rosalind Franklin漫游者（计划于2022年前往火星）在其移动系统中确实有额外的自由度。从长远来看，佐治亚理工学院的研究人员希望他们所学到的知识能为未来的漫游者设计提供参考，使他们能够探索更有趣的地方，而不会让创造者感到压力太大。

素材来源：

https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/space-robots/wiggly-wheels-could-help-keep-rovers-from-dying-on-mars

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin_(rover)

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