Auxiliary Inflatable Wheels For Planetary Rovers

This publication describes the development and testing of an auxiliary inflatable rover wheel concept, AIRWheel, that allows a rover to adapt mid-traverse to particularly loose terrain and high sinkage. As part of NASA’s 2025 BIG Idea Challenge, the University of Maryland’s Space Systems Lab produced a prototype wheel system capable of self-contained and remotely-activated deployment of an inflatable auxiliary wheel from within a rigid wheel’s hub. This hybrid wheel design was compared to several other wheel designs in a single-wheel test rig, where it was shown that the addition of petaled grousers to the deployable element improves torque transfer into the soil, and that there is a benefit to this level of reconfigurability. A small-scale 4-wheel rover was also equipped with AIRWheels to qualitatively showcase their use scenario and slippage improvements over rigid wheels. Lastly, the deployment and mechanical retraction of the hybrid AIRWheel was demonstrated in a vacuum chamber to show the system’s potential use in the near-vacuum of the Moon or low atmospheric pressures of Mars.