Attitude Control of an All-Wheel-Drive Rover with Integrated Active Suspension System

The attitude control is critical for omni-directional vehicles (ODVs) or mobile robots, especially when negotiating with uneven rocky terrains. To improve the pose control capability and traversability performance, some ODVs and rovers are equipped with active suspension system, through which one can improve the robot’s stability and maneuverability, thereby optimizing the robot’s body posture in real time. In this paper, we design an all-wheel-drive, all-wheel-steering ODV named Big Mars Rover (BMR) with integrated active suspension system consisting of independent active suspensions and passive rocker-type differential mechanism. We propose body attitude optimization methods based on hill-climbing and simulated annealing algorithms. We also build a simplified simulation model for BMR and conduct various experiments to verify the feasibility of different attitude optimization methods. The results suggest our BMR has very good body posture adjustment capability over uneven terrains while our attitude control strategies are reliable, demonstrating the effectiveness for future hardware experiments.