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

Abstract

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.

Nonlinear Model Predictive Control for the Stabilization of a Wheeled Unmanned Aerial Vehicle on a Pipe

“…To the authors' knowledge, a thorough search of the relevant literature reveals that it does not exist any paper addressing a task similar to the one tackled by this letter. The most similar applications may be found in those employing climbing [5] and perching robots [6]. The former can climb on the surface of objects with different surface roughness, and the latter can perch on the surface of an object to eventually perform some manipulation tasks.…”

Bioinspired design of a landing system with soft shock absorbers for autonomous aerial robots

“…While the natural world evolves, its processes provides an extensive source of inspiration for creating comprehensive models of artificial systems that can mimic certain functions of their counterparts in nature (Manzanera & Smith, 2015). The bioinspired design paradigm (Kovač, 2014) and perching principles (Liu, Ravi, Kolomenskiy, & Tanaka, 2016;Roderick, Cutkosky, & Lentink, 2017) provide cross-disciplinary approaches to developing new devices by mimicking the natural world in the way of adopting concepts and principles in nature to solve engineering challenges.…”

A direct optic flow-based strategy for inverse flight altitude estimation with monocular vision and IMU measurements

“…With the estimate of distance, aerial robots potentially benefit from the ability to deploy a landing gear at a suitable moment or to approach the surface at arbitrary speed [42,43]. That is, the landing task is no longer constrained to a constant rate of optic flow.…”