RECORDING | STUDENT RESEARCH SEMINAR — Traversing granular regolith, especially in reduced gravity environments, remains a potential challenge for wheeled rovers. Mitigating hazards for planetary exploration rovers requires testing in representative environments, but direct Earth-based testing fails to account for the effect of reduced gravity on the soil itself. The talk considers experimental approaches, and results from recent on-ground experiments evaluating the granular scaling laws in a cohesive lunar soil simulant are presented. Additionally, application of granular scaling laws to testing potential future lunar rovers under development by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is demonstrated. Finally, guidelines for conducting and interpreting 1-g mobility tests for lunar rovers are outlined.

VIEW RECORDING | In this ISTVS Student Research Seminar, we welcome five graduate student researchers connected to the organizing committee of this year’s 11th Asia-Pacific Regional Conference of the ISTVS to talk about their research. Topics include: granular dynamics, intelligent control of wheeled mobile robots, the design of metal flexible wheels for the pressurized lunar rover, terrain classification, terrain mechanical properties sensing, terramechanical mapping, navigation for planetary rovers, wheel soil interaction model, soil bin test, the coupling simulation of FEM and DEM, robot manipulation, including imitation learning, convex optimization, multi-objective optimization, combination of learning with control, the unified contact parameters definition to describe the multi-modal robot-terrain interaction, and motion uncertainty calculations for hybrid robot path planning.