Project Outline Motivation
A lot of outdoor tasks cannot yet be carried out by robots because of their poor mobility in rough terrain. Moreover,
presence of stairs limits the indoor or urban use of mobile robotics.
For planetary exploration, highly autonomous robots are necessary to perform long range missions. Future missions will
change from pure exploration to real exploitation. This will drastically modify the environment of space rovers, that will not
encounter only rocks or dunes but also tranches, pipelines, regular steps or even furrows.
System description
he Shrimp is a 6 wheeled rover. The total weight of this first prototype is 3.1 kg including 600 g of batteries and each
wheel is powered by a 1.75 W DC motor.
Dimensions are L 60 cm x W 35 cm x H 23 cm;
the ground clearance is 15 cm.
One wheel in front, monted on an articulated
fork.
One wheel in rear directly connected to the
body
Two weels are monted on two lateral bogies
The only actuators are the motorized wheels
and the Shrimp adapt purely passively its
structure during the motion to insure its
stability. This allow a very simple control
strategy as well as a low power consumption.
The secret of its high mobility lies in the parallel architecture of the front fork and of the bogies (see the video or the
slides to undertand why).
Capabilities
In a structured environment, this rover is able to ovecome steps of twice its wheel diameter and can climb regular stairs.
Outdoors, Shrimp shows excellent offroad abilities overcoming rocks even with a single bogie. With an frontal inclination of
40 degrees, Shrimp is still able to ovecome obstacles. |
