A Tumbleweed-Mimicing Wind-Driven Rover for Planetary Exploration

In this paper, a wind-driven planet exploring rover has been introduced, whose basic principle is based on a kind of plant called tumbleweed. The rover consists of a spherical steel skeleton and twelve airbags. The rover can complete acceleration, deceleration, stop, and clearing obstacles by inflating or deflating the twelve airbags. The motion control is simple and low cost, it´s therefore appropriate to explore extreme environments.