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Rover with rocker-bogie linkage mounted with an ultrasonic sensor and

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 5th International Engineering Symposium - IES 2016
March 2-4, 2016, Kumamoto University, Japan

Rover with rocker-bogie linkage mounted with an

ultrasonic sensor and Bluetooth module.
Meet Upadhyay 1, B. Suresh2, Dr. Guruprasad K R3, Asavari Limaye, Nischita
Kaza, Prachi Shahi, Vedant Dhruv, Vignesh Radhakrishnan

1 Undergraduate Student, Third Year, Department of Mechanical Engineering, National

Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal, Mangalore 575025, India.
email:meetupadhyay1@gmail.com
2 Undergraduate Student, Third Year, Department of Mechanical Engineering, National
Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal, Mangalore 575025, India. email:
sureshbnarayan94@gmail.com
3 Assistant Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, National Institute of
Technology Karnataka, Surathkal, Mangalore 575025, India.
email:krgprao@gmail.com

ABSTRACT: An economical robot which utilises the Rocker-Bogie linkage, which is also
used by NASA’s Curiosity; to facilitate all terrain movement. The rover has 6 wheels with
independent motors mounted to the linkage. The electronic components are mounted on
a main chassis. The robot also consists of an ultrasonic sensor for obstacle detection and
an android phone for live camera feed and accelerometer values transmitted via a
Bluetooth module. While this is intended to model a space rover, it has terrestrial
applications too. These include mapping and surveying unknown locations as well as
locating survivors in wreckage and live feed.

Keywords: rover, rocker bogie, Arduino, path plotting

INTRODUCTION connections to maintain equal traction and

A planetary rover is a space exploration
vehicle designed to move across the surface
of a celestial body. The advantage of a rover
over an orbiting spacecraft is its ability to
make microscopic observations and
conduct physical experimentation. A rover
is required to be reliable, compact and
autonomous as far as navigation and data
acquisition are concerned. NASA’s current
design uses a two wheeled rocker arm on a
passive pivot attached to a main bogie on
the opposite side (Bickler, 2004). Miller et
al (2002) discussed the need for rovers with
higher traversal speeds for future planetary
missions. They described a method of
driving a rocker bogie linkage which can
effectively step over most obstacles instead
of impacting them, preventing high
dynamic shocks. Barlas (2004) discussed
the different types of suspension systems of
wheeled locomotion which are required to
be simple, lightweight, and have spring-less
be able to distribute load equally to each
wheel and prevent slipping. Tarokh et al.
(1999) have described a rigorous method
for the kinematic modelling of the Rocky 7
Mars Rover in terms of measured wheel
velocities and certain rocker joint angles.
Stone (1996) described the design of
NASA’s Mars Pathfinder and its various
susbsystems. Patel et al. (2010) have
provided the locomotion subsystem
analysis of the ExoMars rover developed by
ESA – a 3 bogie concept with flexible
metallic wheels, body pose adjustment
capability and 6 wheel steering. The paper
focused on the suspension mechanism
performance and wheel performance. Kim
et al. (2011) presented an optimal design
of a wheel type mobile robot with high
stability and excellent adaptability while
climbing stairs using the Taguchi model for
optimization. Harrington et al. (2004)
discussed the design of a lightweight,
compact mechanism for the Mars

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 5th International Engineering Symposium - IES 2016
March 2-4, 2016, Kumamoto University, Japan

Exploration Rover. It also highlighted the the center of gravity must lie below the
various latch and deployment mechanisms platform. Hence, majority of the
employed. components attached below the platform.

MOBILITY

Rocker Bogie Mechanism

The mechanism of the rover is based on a 6
wheeled rocker bogie suspension system.
The mechanism allows the rover to traverse
different kinds of terrains like rocks, sand
and fine dust. The mechanism consists of a
pair of rigid linkages on either side of the
chassis attached to each other via a passive
rotary joint. This joint is constructed by
using two tubes, with internal and external
threads respectively which allows the links
to rotate about the tube’s axis. Each linkage
consists of two rigid links attached to each
other by pivot joint. The front and middle
Fig 1: Completed rover.
wheels of are attached to the ends of the
forward linkage known as the bogie. The
Obstacle Capability
rear wheel is attached to the rear end of the
Obstacle capability is usually compared in
rear linkage known as the rocker. The
terms of wheel diameter. The rover can
forward end of the rocker is attached to the
climb obstacles up to 1.5 times its wheel
middle of the bogie and serves as a pivot
diameter and climb slopes within 3 degrees
point. The rocker is attached to the chassis
of the angle of repose of the soil.
ahead of the rear wheel by the tube
arrangement. The advantage of the
Material
mechanism is the high degree of mobility.
Initially a flexible plastic was used to
As the rover moves, the wheels are free to
construct the links which did not perform
move up and down independently of the
well as it deformed excessively when the
other wheels and hence can follow the
rover was in motion. It was replaced by a
contours of the terrain. It also maintains an
stiffer acrylic board. The tube joint was
almost equal weight distribution on each
made of PVC. Wood was used for the
wheel (Stone, 1996). The bogie only passes
platform because of its strength and light
a portion of its displacement to the rocker
weight.
due to the pivot. When the rover
encounters an obstacle, the front wheels
Table 1 Rover Specifications
are pushed against it by the rear wheels.
The rotation of the front wheel lifts it up and Wheel base 475 mm
over the obstacle. The other wheels move Wheel track 350 mm
similarly. As a wheel encounters an obstacle, Height of rover 300 mm
it comes to a dead stop. The rover must be Platform dimensions 300mm x
operated at very low speeds, otherwise this 300mm x 5mm
shock would damage the vehicle frame Rocker angle 90 deg
and/or flip the vehicle (Miller et al., 2002). Bogie Angle 106 deg
An important phenomenon observed while Wheel Diameter 70 mm
testing, was the lifting off of one of the Motor speed 100 RPM
wheels when it slipped and the other wheels Battery 12 V, 1.5 A
maintained traction. This had to be checked
otherwise it would flip over a bogie and NAVIGATION AND CONTROL
disable the rover. Mechanical stops were
added to limit the maximum rotation of the The rover’s motors and ultrasonic sensors
bogie. For the stability of the mechanism, were controlled using an Arduino Uno.

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 5th International Engineering Symposium - IES 2016
March 2-4, 2016, Kumamoto University, Japan

Arduino is an open source platform that
comes with its own IDE and is significantly
simpler to code than many other
microcontrollers, as it already has a vast set
of libraries available. Hence an Arduino Uno
board was preferred over an MSP 430 or
other similar microcontrollers.
The motors were controlled using motor
driver ICs. The motor driver works on the
principle of a dual H-bridge. If the inputs to
the motor driver are LOW and HIGH, the
shaft rotates in a direction such that the
rover moves forward, and vice versa. If
both the inputs are LOW (or HIGH) the
motor stops, since there is no current
flowing through the motor. To turn the
rover to the right, the wheels on the right
side are made to rotate in the reverse
direction and the ones on the left are moved
forward. In the opposite manner, the rover
is turned left. So the rover turns about its
geometric centre. Due to limited availability
of pins on an Arduino Uno board, the
controls for the motors on each side were
common. The motor controls were lumped
so as to reduce the code size and adhere to
the code limit of a Uno, which is 16KB.
Bluetooth is turned on and the 'Connect to
device' button is pressed, the app presents
a list of visible devices. Upon successful
connection, the buttons on screen can be
used to control the rover's motion. The
slider is used for speed control and is set to
a default value, when the app is started up.
When a button click is recognized, a string
is sent to the serial buffer of the Uno, where
it is received by the inbuilt function
serialEvent(). A set of characters is used to
detect a button click as well as a
termination character to indicate the end of
the string. The character corresponding to
the button click, say 'F' for front is extracted
and the appropriate function is called in the
Arduino code.

Autonomous control was the default control

state of the rover and can be manually
controlled by an override via the app. An
Ultrasonic sensor HC-SR04 was used to
detect obstacles. The sensor has four pins
– trig, echo, Vcc and GND. Trig emits
ultrasonic pulses for 10 microseconds when
the pin is set to HIGH. The echo pin is set
to HIGH when it receives a pulse. The
duration between two successive instances
of echo becoming HIGH is measured; and
the distance of the obstacle calculated. The
rover moves forward by default. When it
detects an obstacle in front, it again triggers
the left and right sensors, measures the
distances of the obstacles to its left and
right, and finally moves in the direction in
which it has more space.
An Android app was used to remotely
control the rover via Bluetooth. The app
was created using MIT App Inventor, an
open source, web based platform.
Communication between the rover and the
app was established using the Bluetooth
module, HC-05. Once the device's
Fig 2: Bluetooth app GUI
PATH PLOTTING
The position of the rover (x and y
coordinates) were plotted using the
wireless Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) of
a mobile phone placed on the rover.
User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is an
alternative communications protocol to
Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and
was used to transmit data. It is primarily
used for establishing low-latency and loss
tolerating connections between applications
on the Internet. It runs on top of the
Internet Protocol (IP).
The following apps were used to obtain data
and manipulate the path of the rover:

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 5th International Engineering Symposium - IES 2016
IMU+GPS Stream: A Stream containing
the values of Accelerometer, Gyroscope,
Magnetometer, GPS Position and other
Sensor-Values in CSV- Format by WLAN to
a Client and/or a Stream (using UDP
interface) to a SD-Card can be started and
stopped.
IP Webcam: The app turns the phone into
a network camera with multiple viewing
options. The camera feed can be viewed on
any platform with a VLC media player or
browser. This app was used to display the
video feed from the rover.
The velocities in x, y and z directions are
calculated by the product of the
acceleration values obtained from the IMU
and the difference in the time between two
incoming data pulses.
𝑣𝑥 = 𝑎𝑥 . 𝑑𝑡, 𝑣𝑦 = 𝑎𝑦 . 𝑑𝑡, 𝑣𝑧 = 𝑎𝑧 . 𝑑𝑡 (1)
The displacements are calculated as:
𝑋𝑥 = 𝑣𝑥 . 𝑑𝑡, 𝑋𝑦 = 𝑣𝑦 . 𝑑𝑡, 𝑋𝑧 = 𝑣𝑧 . 𝑑𝑡 (2)
To account for sudden changes:
𝑋𝑥 = 0.1𝑋𝑥 + 0.9𝑋𝑥
𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑣
𝑋𝑦 = 0.1𝑋𝑦 + 0.9𝑋𝑦
𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑣
𝑋𝑧 = 0.1𝑋𝑧 + 0.9𝑋𝑧
𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑣 𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑣 𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑣
𝑋𝑥 , 𝑋𝑦 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑋𝑧 are the previous values
of displacement along the fixed axis.
Rotation Vector Values 𝑂𝑥 , 𝑂𝑦 , 𝑂𝑧 obtained
from the IMU: 𝑅⃗ = 𝑂𝑥 𝑖̂ + 𝑂𝑦 𝑗̂ + 𝑂𝑧 𝑘̂
𝜃
𝑅𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑉𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑜𝑟 𝑅⃗ = sin
2
The angle of rotation of axis
𝜃 = 2 sin−1 √𝑂𝑥2 + 𝑂𝑦2 + 𝑂𝑧2
u, v, w are found using:
𝜃 𝜃
𝑂𝑥 = 𝑢 sin 𝑂𝑦 = 𝑣 sin
2 2
A rotation matrix was used to find the
displacement along the fixed coordinate
system (Ground) using the displacement in
the phone’s coordinate system, angle of
rotation, and direction cosines of the line
along which the system was rotated.
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March 2-4, 2016, Kumamoto University, Japan
(𝑢𝑖̂ + 𝑣𝑗̂ + 𝑤𝑘̂ ) is the unit vector along axis of
rotation and 𝜃 is the angle by which the axis
is rotated. 𝑋𝑥 , 𝑋𝑦 , 𝑋𝑧 are the displacements
along the phone's axis in the time Tp to Tc.
𝑋𝑥 , 𝑋𝑦 , 𝑋𝑧 are now updated to be the
displacements along the fixed axis. The final
displacements are obtained along the fixed
coordinate axes which are used to plot the
position of the rover.
CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK
Thus the various subsystems were
integrated to construct a fully functional
and robust rover.
Future plans for the rover include:
 A more robust design with double
bogie arrangement
 Installation of temperature and
pressure sensors
 Implementation of path planning
algorithms
 Improve path plotting performance
for quicker response
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The members of the Amateur Astronomy
Club, NITK and Astro Committee 2015 who
contributed to the project and provided
𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑣
, financial support.
REFERENCES
(3) [1] Barlas, F (2004). Design of a Mars Rover
suspension mechanism, Doctoral dissertation, Izmir
Institute of Technology.
[2] Bickler, D (1993), The New Family of JPL Planetary
Surface Vehicles, in Missions, Technologies and Design
of Planetary Mobile Vehicles, pp. 301-306, D. Moura,
Ed., Cepadues-Editions Publisher, Toulouse France.
[3] Harrington, BD and Voorhees, C (2004), The
Challenges of Designing the Rocker-Bogie Suspension
(𝑢𝑖̂ + 𝑣𝑗̂ + 𝑤𝑘̂) (4) for the Mars Exploration Rover, 37th Aerospace
Mechanisms Symposium, pp 185-195.
[4] Kim, D, Hong, H, Kim, HS, & Kim, J (2012). Optimal
design and kinetic analysis of a stair-climbing mobile
robot with rocker-bogie mechanism. Mechanism and
machine theory, v. 50, pp. 90-108.
(5)
[5] Miller, D and Lee, T (2002) High-Speed Traversal
of Rough Terrain Using a Rocker-Bogie Mobility
System. Space 2002 and Robotics 2002: pp. 428-434.
[6] Patel, N, Slade, R, & Clemmet, J (2010). The
𝜃 ExoMars rover locomotion subsystem. Journal of
𝑂𝑧 = 𝑤 sin (6) Terramechanics, v. 47, n. 4, pp. 227-242.
2
[7] Stone, HW (1996). Mars pathfinder microrover-a
small, low-cost, low-power spacecraft. Jet Propulsion
Laboratory.
[8] Tarokh, M, McDermott, G, Hayati, S, & Hung, J
(1999), Kinematic modeling of a high mobility Mars
rover. In Robotics and Automation, 1999. Proceedings.
1999 IEEE International Conference on, v. 2, pp. 992-
998.