A Bio-Inspired Adaptive Perching Mechanism for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Chi, Wanchao; Low, Kin Huat; Hoon, K. H.; Tang, Johnson; Go, Tiauw Hiong

doi:10.20965/jrm.2012.p0642

Cited by 14 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…These surfaces can be gripped from any direction, and allow for slight misalignment on contact. Many enclosed grasping mechanisms use jointed or compliant fingers [55,56,[169][170][171][172][173][174][175], though others involve simply hooking and hanging (figure 3a,n) [58]. By contrast, one unusual modular snake-like robot wraps its entire body around cylinders upon contact (figure 3i) [59].…”

Section: Surface Contact and Locomotion In Aerial Robotsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Touchdown to take-off: at the interface of flight and surface locomotion

Roderick¹,

Cutkosky²,

Lentink³

2017

Interface Focus.

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Small aerial robots are limited to short mission times because aerodynamic and energy conversion efficiency diminish with scale. One way to extend mission times is to perch, as biological flyers do. Beyond perching, small robot flyers benefit from manoeuvring on surfaces for a diverse set of tasks, including exploration, inspection and collection of samples. These opportunities have prompted an interest in bimodal aerial and surface locomotion on both engineered and natural surfaces. To accomplish such novel robot behaviours, recent efforts have included advancing our understanding of the aerodynamics of surface approach and take-off, the contact dynamics of perching and attachment and making surface locomotion more efficient and robust. While current aerial robots show promise, flying animals, including insects, bats and birds, far surpass them in versatility, reliability and robustness. The maximal size of both perching animals and robots is limited by scaling laws for both adhesion and claw-based surface attachment. Biomechanists can use the current variety of specialized robots as inspiration for probing unknown aspects of bimodal animal locomotion. Similarly, the pitch-up landing manoeuvres and surface attachment techniques of animals can offer an evolutionary design guide for developing robots that perch on more diverse and complex surfaces.

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Section: Surface Contact and Locomotion In Aerial Robotsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Touchdown to take-off: at the interface of flight and surface locomotion

Roderick¹,

Cutkosky²,

Lentink³

2017

Interface Focus.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…That is acceptable because we are not intended to mimic all the functionalities of bird feet such as the walking, running, scratching functions. References [24] and [25] also presented similar types of UAV grippers but they did not select their design using the kind of decision matrix based analysis that we have done. The foot mechanism of our design is underactuated.…”

Section: B Perching On An Objectmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It also helps grasp a branch of large diameter which the digits may not be long enough to wrap around. Different from the claw design in [25], we introduce a torsional spring at the joint of the nail (see Fig.6) to prevent the nail from easily penetrating into the attached surface and to passively release from the grasped target. Similar to human hands, bird feet also have an anti-flip mechanism to prevent the digits flip toward outside.…”

Section: B Perching On An Objectmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Bio-inspired UAV Leg-Foot Mechanism for Landing, Grasping and Perching Tasks

Xie

Zhen

et al. 2015

AIAA Atmospheric Flight Mechanics Conference

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Landing and perching on as well as taking off from a variety of different objects reliably like birds are still very difficult tasks for currently available unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) including micro air vehicles (MAVs). Research efforts are still needed in order to advance the technology for practical applications. This paper presents a novel bio-inspired design of a UAV leg-foot mechanism, which allows the host vehicle to perform tasks including landing on, perching on, and taking off from either a flat surface or a non-flat object like a tree branch. It also allows the vehicle to do a pick-and-place task for payload transportation. Such combined capabilities can significantly improve the agility and applicability of UAVs for many useful applications. The presented device includes a cable-driven leg mechanism and a cabledriven gripper (called foot for birds) mechanism with three fingers. The mechanical design is based on an analysis of the anatomy of bird legs and feet. The device is intended to have both active and passive grasping capabilities just like how a bird does the similar tasks. Kinematics and dynamics of the mechanical system are modelled and analyzed. An early prototype of the device and a few manually operated grasping examples are also presented.

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“…Kovač et al have designed a simple and practical perching mechanism based on the concept of the target surface using needles [6]. Chi et al have proposed a design of bioinspired adaptive perching mechanism, and it mainly focused on the static characteristics [7]. Still other works have focused on performing perching maneuvers using a morphing airplane [8,9].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unified Switching between Active Flying and Perching of a Bioinspired Robot Using Impedance Control

Chen

Liu

et al. 2015

Journal of Robotics

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Currently, a bottleneck problem for battery-powered microflying robots is time of endurance. Inspired by flying animal behavior in nature, an innovative mechanism with active flying and perching in the three-dimensional space was proposed to greatly increase mission life and more importantly execute tasks perching on an object in the stationary way. In prior work, we have developed some prototypes of flying and perching robots. However, when the robots switch between flying and perching, it is a challenging issue to deal with the contact between the robot and environment under the traditional position control without considering the stationary obstacle and external force. Therefore, we propose a unified impedance control approach for bioinspired flying and perching robots to smoothly contact with the environment. The dynamic model of the bioinspired robot is deduced, and the proposed impedance control method is employed to control the contact force and displacement with the environment. Simulations including the top perching and side perching and the preliminary experiments were conducted to validate the proposed method. Both simulation and experimental results validate the feasibility of the proposed control methods for controlling a bioinspired flying and perching robot.

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A Bio-Inspired Adaptive Perching Mechanism for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Cited by 14 publications

References 15 publications

Touchdown to take-off: at the interface of flight and surface locomotion

Touchdown to take-off: at the interface of flight and surface locomotion

A Bio-inspired UAV Leg-Foot Mechanism for Landing, Grasping and Perching Tasks

Unified Switching between Active Flying and Perching of a Bioinspired Robot Using Impedance Control

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