CanSats are earth bound analogues for orbital micro and picosatellites. These devices have become increasingly relevant as small-scale satellites, such as CubeSats, have grown in popularity and accessibility. With additional robotic frontiers for the exploration of space also becoming increasingly accessible, analogous systems for researching planetary surface rovers may also be potentially relevant. This research expands on the emerging field of “CanBots”, which refers to this kind of earth-bound analogue for planetary surface exploring robots. The novel modular CanBot developed in this research represents a unique design framework whereby mobility aspects of the vehicle form discrete and interchangeable modules. Initial characterization of the locomotion capabilities of these modules were determined independently using an optical Motion Capture system. Then the modules were combined into a single multimodal system for additional mobility testing. Vehicle trajectories for an Aerial Quadrotor CanBot, Terrestrial Quadruped CanBot and the combined Multimodal CanBot have been compiled in this research. Initial results suggest that the Multimodal CanBot can successfully reproduce the locomotion techniques for the aerial and terrestrial modalities, but at the cost of lower overall movement efficiency in either modality.
Modular Multimodal CanBot Trajectory Tracking with Optical Motion Capture System
2024-07-18
597808 byte
Conference paper
Electronic Resource
English
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