This paper aims to propose a novel wheel-based multiaxis force sensor designed to detect the interaction forces and moments between the planetary rover’s wheel and the terrain, thereby assisting the rover in environmental perception.
The authors’ design approach encompasses the mechanical structure design, decoupling methods and component integration techniques, effectively incorporating multiaxis sensors into the forward-sensing wheel. This enables high-precision and high-reliability detection of wheel–terrain interaction forces and torques.
The designed wheel-based multiaxis force sensor exhibits a nonlinearity error of 0.45%, a hysteresis error of 0.56% and a repeatability error of 0.49%, meeting the requirements for practical applications. Furthermore, the effectiveness and stability of the designed wheel-based multidimensional force sensor have been validated through hardware-in-the-loop experiments and full-vehicle model testing.
Unlike previous methods that directly integrate multiaxis sensors into the forward-sensing wheel, the authors have designed the force sensing wheel with consideration of its limited design space and the need for high measurement accuracy. The effectiveness of the designed wheel-based multidimensional force sensor was ultimately validated through static calibration, hardware-in-the-loop experiments and full-vehicle model experiments.
