Gabriele Pancia
Control strategy for the body attitude of a lunar rover with active suspensions.
Rel. Elisa Capello. Politecnico di Torino, Master of science program in Aerospace Engineering, 2026
Abstract
Reliable posture control is a key capability for lunar rovers, as terrain irregularities and compliant suspensions can induce large chassis motions that degrade payload pointing, sensor performance, and overall mobility. This thesis investigates posture control for a lunar exploration rover featuring four wheeled legs equipped with active suspensions driven by Series Elastic Actuators (SEAs). The robotic platform, developed at Thales Alenia Space Italia (TAS-I) within the ESA European Moon Rover System (EMRS) programme, enables active regulation of chassis heave, roll, and pitch through modulation of SEA- generated leg torques. A high-fidelity simulation framework is developed in MATLAB/Simulink, employing a multibody model implemented in Simscape to capture the coupled suspension–body dynamics and reproduce representative terrain-induced excitations.
A systematically structured set of disturbance scenarios is defined to evaluate posture regulation performance under realistic operating conditions, explicitly accounting for actuator constraints and safety limits
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