• Journal of Astronomy and Space Sciences
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• v.38 no.4
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• pp.237-250
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• 2021

A rover is a planetary surface exploration device designed to move across the ground on a planet or a planetary-like body. Exploration rovers are increasingly becoming a vital part of the search for scientific evidence and discoveries on a planetary satellite of the Sun, such as the Moon or Mars. Reliable behavior and predictable locomotion of a rover is important. Understanding soil behavior and its interaction with rover wheels-the terramechanics-is of great importance in rover exploration performance. Up to now, many researchers have adopted Bekker's semiempirical model to predict rover wheelsoil interaction, which is based on the assumption that soil is deformable when a pressure is applied to it. Despite this basic assumption of the model, the pressure-sinkage relation is not fully understood, and it continues to present challenges for rover designers. This article presents a new pressure-sinkage model based on dimensional analysis (DA) and results of bevameter tests. DA was applied to the test results in order to propose a new pressure-sinkage model by reducing physical quantitative parameters. As part of the work, a new bevameter was designed and built so that it could be successfully used to obtain a proper pressure-sinkage relation of Korean Lunar Soil Simulant (KLS-1). The new pressure-sinkage model was constructed by using three different sizes of flat plate diameters of the bevameter. The newly proposed model was compared successfully with other models for validation purposes.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.1-8
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• 1987

New design of a bevameter was attempted to that it can be not only attached to and powered by the tractor hydraulic control system, but is equipped with a data acquisition system using a microcomputer. Results of field tests of the new design showed that it has a good performance and practical applicability to the measurements of pressure-sinkage and shear stress-displacement relations from which toil parameters of the Bekker theory can be evaluated.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.89-98
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• 1999

In this paper, to estimate the effectiveness of the tractive performance prediction model(TPPMTV98) which was developed to predict the tractive performance of flexible tracked vehicles in previous paper, the experimental substantiation of the TPPMTV98 were conducted with the reconstructed tracked vehicle on the loam soil with the moisture content of 18.92%, and bevameter was constructed in order to measure soil properties in situ. The drawbar pulls measure were compared with predicted ones. As a result, the predicted drawbar pulls by the TPPMTV98 were well matched to the measured ones. Such results implied that the TPPMTV98 could well estimate the drawbar pulls at given soil conditions, and would be very useful as a simulation tool for designing a flexible tracked vehicle and predicting its tractive performance.