Scalable Wing Sailing and Snowboarding Enhance Efficient and Energy-Saving Mobility of Polar Robot

The polar regions have typical representative characteristics of the Earth's environmental background, and conducting scientific exploration here is of great significance. Although a large number of polar robots have been designed and applied, efficient and pollution-free mobile operations still face challenges. A polar robot that achieves efficient, stable, and pollution-free movement in snowy environments through sails and snowboards is proposed in this article. It can use snowboard to achieve carve slip steering and plow braking to enhance movement maneuverability. Meanwhile, based on the proposed optimized assistance strategy, it achieves energy-saving control of the sail assistance mechanism under the constraint of robot movement stability. Finally, the robot prototype was developed, and the motion ability test and energy-saving mobile efficiency test were carried out. The results showed that the steering radius could be reduced by 6% compared with the wheel structure steering radius and the efficiency of sail assistance could be increased by 28% compared with no sail assistance.