Speaker
Description
The Mars Moon eXploration (MMX) mission of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) will launch in 2024 and explore Phobos. The Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR) and Centre National D'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) jointly develop a 29 kg rover that will land on Phobos and explore its surface. This presentation focuses specifically on the locomotion subsystem of the MMX rover, which is developed by the Robotics and Mechatronic (RMC) and System Dynamics and Control (SR) institutes at DLR. This subsystem is a highly dynamic and critical part of the rover. Therefore, thermal modelling, analysis and testing is performed to validate the thermal behaviour, functionality, and power consumption. In order to validate system requirements regarding power consumption, an extensive characterisation is performed inside extreme thermal environments. With Matlab Simulink, a thermal network was made to estimate the system’s temperature range. According to this range, a test setup was designed and built. Since many tests are done in different thermal scenarios, an efficient and rapid test setup is needed. A fully integrated testing setup is presented, which logs all the temperature and power data, and controls the locomotion system. All measurement devices are interlinked via a LAN interface which enables low-latency and high bandwidth logging. To avoid extraneous manual work in post-processing, data streams are synchronised and saved in one easily accessible data file. Strong temperature dependence of power consumption is found and quantified.
