Operational Space Formulation and Analysis for Rovers

Many techniques have been developed for analyzing and evaluating mechanical systems for the purpose of improving design and control, such as the operational space formulation. It has been been shown to be a useful tool when working with robotic manipulators, but has not been extended to consider rovers. Rovers are fundamentally different due to the wheel-ground contact, that does not exist for fixed-base systems. In this paper, several different aspects of the operations space formulation, inertial properties, control, multi-arm systems, redundancy, and unactuated coordinates are investigated in the context of rovers. By considering a different interpretation of the operational space of a rover, several sets of generalized coordinates were chosen to represent the movement of two example rovers. Simulations were performed to demonstrate how these choices of generalized coordinates can be used to analyze various characteristics of the rovers and can improve the behavior for certain maneuvers, such as wheel walking.