Design, Modeling, and Experimentation of Polar Robot: Assisted Sail and Multimode Motion for Energy Saving

Polar robots are difficult to conduct long‐term scientific exploration in unmanned polar areas because of the limited energy supplied. A polar robot that utilizes assisted sail and multimode motion to achieve energy‐saving is proposed. The assisted sail is foldable, providing assistance force for the robot in unfolded state and coping with extreme wind speed conditions in folded state. The multimode includes the traction mode with high energy consumption and the sliding mode with low energy consumption, which can be switched through variable‐form tracks. To improve the motion ability in sliding mode, the carve slip steering and plow braking for sleds are borrowed from human skiing. Based on kinematic and dynamic models, this article proposes a multimode switching algorithm and sail control methods. On this basis, energy‐saving control frameworks and strategies for each mode are proposed, and the effectiveness of energy‐saving is verified through simulation. Finally, experiments are conducted to verify the robot's motion ability, sampling ability, and energy‐saving effect. The results show that the energy‐saving effect of the robot using a multimode energy savings control strategy reaches 21.19%, providing technical support for long‐term polar scientific research.