Results of the Inflatable Robotic Rover Testbed

Inflatable robotic rovers (IRRs) are a promising concept for long-range exploration and access to high-risk areas on planetary surfaces. Through inflation or expansion of their locomotion elements, inflatable rovers can achieve extraordinary terrainability not possible by other conventional mobility systems while maintaining respectable travel speeds. Early work by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has identified key mobility advantages, but design optimality and limitations relative to mission requirements are currently not known. This paper describes CMU's experimental studies that characterize single robotic wheel performance in terms of rolling resistance, drawbar pull, drive torque, drive power and tire wear. These studies were performed with a testbed apparatus that allowed variation of tire design, wheel speed / acceleration, tire pressure, soil / obstacle properties and traverse length

Analysis of High-Efficiency Solar Cells in Mobile Robot Applications

This technical brief analyzes the performance of triple-junction solar cells on a mobile robot. Although originally designed for satellite use, it is demonstrated that triple-junction cells are effective in terrestrial applications. This makes them particularly suitable for systems with limited size and mass but high-power requirements such as a mobile robot. A testing station was specially constructed to characterize triple-junction and conventional silicon cell performance in different environments and to compare their effectiveness. Additional field tests were carried out with an autonomous robot in order to check the ability to deliver sufficient power to varying loads. Results show that they surpass conventional technologies with efficiencies higher than 22%, so they can be considered as an alternative technology for power sources onboard of terrestrial mobile robots. �DOI: 10.1115/1.2735361

Results of the Inflatable Robotic Rover Testbed

Inflatable robotic rovers (IRRs) are a promising concept for long-range exploration and access to high-risk areas on planetary surfaces. Through inflation or expansion of their locomotion elements, inflatable rovers can achieve extraordinary terrainability not possible by other conventional mobility systems while maintaining respectable travel speeds. Early work by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has identified key mobility advantages, but design optimality and limitations relative to mission requirements are currently not known. This paper describes CMU's experimental studies that characterize single robotic wheel performance in terms of rolling resistance, drawbar pull, drive torque, drive power and tire wear. These studies were performed with a testbed apparatus that allowed variation of tire design, wheel speed / acceleration, tire pressure, soil / obstacle properties and traverse length

Dept. of Computer Science

This paper presents a scalable electro-optical interconnection network architecture which is suitable for tightly coupled multiprocessors. The architecture is called a Partitioned Optical Passive Star (POPS). It is a type of multiple passive star topology in which only constant and symmetric coupler fanouts are used and in which exactly one coupler is traversed on any path through the network. Control is based on the state sequence routing paradigm which multiplexes the network between a small set of control states and defines a control operation to be a transformation of those states. These networks have highly scalable characteristics for optical power budget, resource count, and message latency. Optical power is uniformly distributed and the size of the system is not hard limited by the power budget. Resource complexity grows with asymptotic complexity O(n) for the couplers, O(nÖn) for transceivers, and O(Ön log(n)) for control. In this paper, we present a static analysis and a simu..