Perching and resting—A paradigm for UAV maneuvering with modularized landing gears

Abstract

Perching helps small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) extend their time of operation by saving battery power. However, most strategies for UAV perching require complex maneuvering and rely on specific structures, such as rough walls for attaching or tree branches for grasping. Many strategies to perching neglect the UAV’s mission such that saving battery power interrupts the mission. We suggest enabling UAVs with the capability of making and stabilizing contacts with the environment, which will allow the UAV to consume less energy while retaining its altitude, in addition to the perching capability that has been proposed before. This new capability is termed “resting.” For this, we propose a modularized and actuated landing gear framework that allows stabilizing the UAV on a wide range of different structures by perching and resting. Modularization allows our framework to adapt to specific structures for resting through rapid prototyping with additive manufacturing. Actuation allows switching between different modes of perching and resting during flight and additionally enables perching by grasping. Our results show that this framework can be used to perform UAV perching and resting on a set of common structures, such as street lights and edges or corners of buildings. We show that the design is effective in reducing power consumption, promotes increased pose stability, and preserves large vision ranges while perching or resting at heights. In addition, we discuss the potential applications facilitated by our design, as well as the potential issues to be addressed for deployment in practice.

MHYRO: Modular HYbrid RObot for contact inspection and maintenance in oil & gas plants

“…Robots that combine different mobility systems have been designed to work in complex environments. These include aerial robots that are able to perch on walls and cables [16][17] [18] [19], prototypes that fly and roll over ground [20], and also robots that fly and sail on water [21] or can fly and dig underwater [22]. However, most of these prototypes have been built for multimodal mobility demonstration and have not been designed to perform work in industrial plants.…”

Extending Our Scientific Reach in Arboreal Ecosystems for Research and Management

“…This allows UAVs to fly within forests and inspect enclosed spaces, crevasses within glaciers, tunnels, or underground mines. Some aerial platforms can also land on high power electrical lines for in-contact inspection (Mirallès et al, 2018) or perch on surfaces/branches of various orientations for extended monitoring (Roderick et al, 2017;Hang et al, 2019;Mehanovic et al, 2019;Nguyen et al, 2019). Many new commercial UAVs now also have sensors to autonomously avoid obstacles when navigating around hiking trails, construction sites, or underground mines (e.g., Skydio, Emesent).…”

Maneuvering Control of Hexrotor UAV Equipped With a Cable-Driven Gripper

“…In the modern era, grasping an object from a gripper has become an emerging research topic in the field of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) [1][2][3]. Many different types of other tools are integrated with an aerial vehicle to complete the manipulation task.…”