Novel design of a family of legged mobile landers based on decoupled landing and walking functions

Abstract

The lander has made a significant contribution to soft landings and exploration of an extraterrestrial surface. To further expand its detection range and meet the needs of base construction in the future, it is necessary to design a legged mobile lander (LML) that lets the fixed lander walk. In this paper, a decoupled functions synthesis method (DFSM), which means the decoupled landing and walking functions for LMLs, is proposed: it uses separate structures of landing leg (LL) and walking leg (WL) to perform landing and walking functions. The structure of the Chang’e lander’s leg is selected and designed as the LL. The structures of WLs are determined and presented by the Lie group type synthesis method. In accordance with the combination principle, the landing-walking leg (LWL) for LMLs is designed by combining the structures of a LL and a WL. The structures of a family of LMLs are achieved by assembling the same or different structures of legs. Furthermore, the actuated joints are assigned according to the principle for selecting the actuated joint and one case of LWL is selected as an optimized type by the qualitative evaluation. Finally, one leg of LMLs is taken as an example to analyze the properties and abilities during different stages.