Preliminary design of actuators for walking robot on the Moon

Abstract

Legged robots have been proposed as a possible alternative to wheeled systems for accessing so-far hard to reach locations in our solar system. However, despite promising results in this field, significant challenges have to be solved before deployment. In particular, the actuation of walking robots in space is still an open engineering question. In this work, we focus on actuation of space-legged robots and propose a preliminary actuator sizing. Torque and velocity profiles are derived from simulations, and power consumption, heat generation and emission are computed as functions of several design parameters. A simplified thermal model is used to calculate the equilibrium temperature. Finally, design specifications and considerations are drawn from the analysis.