Rover Wheel Slip & Traction Simulator

Planetary rovers don't grip the ground the way a car does on pavement — on loose regolith, a spinning wheel can lose most of its traction long before the motor stalls. This simulator drives a six-wheeled rover up a sloped, rock-strewn regolith bed and models the real force balance between commanded wheel speed, soil traction (a saturating slip-vs-drawbar-pull curve drawn from terramechanics), gravity along the slope, and rolling resistance. Switch between hard regolith, loose regolith, and a soft sand trap to see equilibrium slip climb from a few percent to nearly 100% — the same physical trap that stranded NASA's Spirit rover in 2009 — while live telemetry tracks slip ratio, actual ground speed, traction force, and distance driven.