A Novel Teleoperated Hybrid Wheel-Limb Hexapod for Lunar Craters' Exploration

Successful robotic planetary exploration missions are not without technical and scientific challenges. Appropriate control and mobility of the robot is critical for successful exploration in unstructured environments. We address these problems through an overview of an under development telerobotic platform for exploration missions to the lunar craters. The platform is based on a novel transforming hybrid walking/roving Lunar Exploration Omnidirectional Netbot (LEON). We describe a versatile dynamic engine based simulator/teleoperation platform called ERode (Eric Rohmer Open Dynamic Engine), which allows developing, simulating and teleoperation of LEON. We also introduce the novel hybrid wheel/limb design of LEON, whereby two of its six limbs fold into themselves transforming into wheels. This possibility of transformation results in increased mobility in the environment, by adapting to different soil conditions. Furthermore, this system has a limited bulkiness compared to hybrid systems owning both wheels and legs, and it has an increased wheel diameter compared to hybrid systems having wheels at the tip of their legs. Preliminary experimental or simulated results are also presented, showing the performance of the hybrid system dealing with different types of terrain