Abstract: By analyzing the body changes of the horse, the deployable pattern of the horse limbs is employed as a reference in the study of rover suspension. Sojourner suspension is chosen as the initial configuration, after analyzing its self-adaptability, four-bar straight line mechanism is proposed to enhance its obstacle climbing ability, especially for the step obstacle. Furthermore, multiple constraints quadrilateral suspension is presented. Through modeling and analyzing the four-bar straight line mechanism, the endpoint trajectory of the bar connected with the wheel is achieved, and the size for each bar is achieved under dimension constraints of the rover, then folded scheme of the rover suspension is obtained and fully meets the folded ratio and locomotion performance under folded state. Simulating two deployable schemes respectively, one with better performance is chosen by comparing the simulating results.

Key words: bionics;suspension;folded-deployable;straight line mechanism;self-adaptability