Traversing granular regolith, especially in reduced gravity environments, remains a potential challenge for wheeled rovers. Mitigating hazards for planetary exploration rovers requires testing in representative environments, but direct Earth-based testing fails to account for the effect of reduced gravity on the soil itself. Granular scaling laws (GSL) have been proposed in the literature to predict performance of a larger wheel based on tests with a smaller wheel, or to predict performance in one gravity level based on tests in another gravity level. However, this is the first work to experimentally validate GSL in reduced gravity. Here, an expanded version of existing GSL was evaluated experimentally by measuring performance of a single wheel driving through cohesionless lunar soil simulant GRC-1 aboard parabolic flights that reproduce the effects of lunar gravity, and comparing those results to scaled tests performed on the ground. This scaled-wheel testing achieved less than 10% prediction error on three measured output metrics: drawbar pull (i.e. net traction), sinkage, and power draw. Predictions also erred on the conservative side. Subsurface soil imaging revealed similar soil behavior between scaled tests. GSL thus offers an accurate and conservative method for predicting wheel performance in reduced gravity based on 1-g experiments, at least in cohesionless soil.

The accurate and efficient modeling of granular flows and their interactions with external bodies is an open research problem. Continuum methods can be used to capture complexities neglected by terramechanics models without the computational expense of discrete element methods. Constitutive models and numerical solvers are the two primary aspects of the continuum methods. The viscoplastic size-dependent nonlocal granular fluidity (NGF) constitutive model has successfully provided a quantitative description of experimental flows in many different configurations in literature. This research develops a numerical approach, within a hyperelasticity framework, for implementing the dynamical form of NGF in three-dimensional material point method (3D MPM, an appropriate numerical solver for granular flow modeling). This approach is thermodynamically consistent to conserve energy, and the dynamical form includes the nonlocal effect of flow cessation. Excavation data, both quantitative measurements and qualitative visualization, are collected experimentally via our robotic equipment to evaluate the model with respect to the flow geometry as well as interaction forces. The results are further compared with the results from a recent modified plastic Drucker–Prager constitutive model, and in other configurations including wheel–soil interactions, a gravity-driven silo, and Taylor–Couette flow.