Development of a Dynamic Simulation Tool for the Exomars Rover

Future planetary missions, including the 2011 European Space Agency (ESA) ExoMars mission, will require rovers to travel further, faster, and over more demanding terrain than has been encountered to date. To improve overall mobility, advances need to be made in autonomous navigation, power collection, and locomotion. In this paper we focus on the locomotion problem and discuss the development of a planetary rover chassis simulation tool that allows us to study key locomotion test cases such as slope climbing in loose soil. We have also constructed rover wheels and obtained experimental data to validate the wheel-soil interaction module. The main conclusion is that to fully validate such a complex simulation, experimental data from a full rover chassis is required. This is a first step in an on-going effort to validate the simulation with experimental data obtained from a full rover prototype.