Rapidly Developing Rovers

It is 175.3 million miles from the Earth to Mars, so if you’re sending a vehicle there to investigate, the last thing you want is a dead battery. That, in part, was the challenge for Dr. Amir Khajepour, Canada research chair in mechatronic vehicle systems and professor of engineering at the University of Waterloo, who worked on developing a power management system for autonomous robotic rovers. The goal was simple—and exceedingly complex. It was to design a rover that could go from point A to point B. That’s the simple part. The complex part was going from A to B while taking into account the battery, solar power generation, terrain, and soil conditions. So Khajepour used an advanced physical modeling tool from Maplesoft (maplesoft.com), MapleSim, to design a multi-domain model of the rover.

Built on a foundation of symbolic computation technology, the complex mathematics involved in the development of engineering system models were managed by MapleSim in developing the rover. MapleSim’s graphical interface also allowed Khajepour to re-create the system diagram on the computer screen using components representing the physical model before transforming the models into animations for validation.

“With the use of MapleSim, the base model of the rover was developed in a month,” Khajepour says. “We now have the mathematical model of the six-wheeled rover without writing down a single equation. MapleSim was able to generate an optimum set of equations for the rover system automatically, which is essential in the optimization phase.”