Crab – Exploration Rover with Advanced Obstacle Negotiation Capabilities

Many exploration rovers have been proposed in the past, but none was compared to other systems. Therefore, this paper not only introduces the locomotion concept CRAB, but also compares it to other rovers regarding obstacle negotiation capabilities. Instead of relying only on simulation, a comparison was also performed with real breadboards. In reality the CRAB is compared to RCL-E (Concept E by RCL); the simulations include the MER (Mars Exploration Rover by NASA) as well. The simulations predict significantly superior performance of CRAB compared to RCL-E, which is confirmed by the tests on hardware. The performance of CRAB and MER is similar; however, the CRAB has the same behavior in forward and backward motion because it is a symmetrical structure, while the MER has significantly inferior performance in backward motion.