The activity was part of a two-semester senior capstone engineering design course in mechanical engineering at the University of Vermont. The goal of this project is to design, construct, and experimentally validate a mobile
testbed prototype for the testing of robotic wheel operation that would facilitate rover wheel-regolith interaction studies in reduced gravity in support of a future rover deployment near lunar poles. Specifically, the prototype testbed will employ a lunar regolith simulant and will evaluate wheel sinkage and/or slippage under prescribed
normal loading at different surface inclinations and under reduced gravity (i.e., one-fourth Earth conditions). The experiments will be controlled, and all measurements taken, using a wireless mobile computing platform. The prototype must be designed with mobility in mind as it will ultimately be used on a NASA reduced gravity aircraft. As this aircraft achieves reduced gravity conditions for limited time intervals by flying in parabolic arcs,
the testbed must be capable of re-setting its regolith conditions (soil loosening and leveling) during the non-reduced gravity portions of the flight.