Driving Characteristics of a Lunar Rover in a Regolith Simulant Environment

The lunar rover has been developed in many institutes and universities for the pre-investigation and excavation on the moon surface development in the next generation. It has been well-known that the moon is covered with a fine-grained material called regolith, which significantly affects its traversability compared to terrestrial conditions. In the field of terramechanics, the locomotion dynamics on soft soil have been considered. However, lunar rovers generally have smaller wheel diameters and are significantly lighter than terrestrial vehicles, leaving many aspects of their mobility still unexplored. In this research, the traversability of our developed lunar rover was evaluated by conducting experiments on special regolith simulant. The simulant used here is a newly proposed material by our research team. By utilizing a large-scale accumulation of this simulant, inclined surfaces resembling lunar craters were constructed and the lunar rover’s behavior under these conditions was analyzed.