When Being Soft Makes You Tough: A Collision-Resilient Quadcopter Inspired by Arthropods' Exoskeletons

Abstract

Flying robots are usually rather delicate, and require protective enclosures when facing the risk of collision. High complexity and reduced payload are recurrent problems with collision-tolerant flying robots. Inspired by arthropods' exoskeletons, we design a simple, easily manufactured, semi-rigid structure with flexible joints that can withstand high-velocity impacts. With an exoskeleton, the protective shell becomes part of the main robot structure, thereby minimizing its loss in payload capacity. Our design is simple to build and customize using cheap components and consumer-grade 3D printers. Our results show we can build a sub-250 g, autonomous quadcopter with visual navigation that can survive multiple collisions at speeds up to 7 m s −1 that is also suitable for automated battery swapping, and with enough computing power to run deep neural network models. This structure makes for an ideal platform for highrisk activities (such as flying in a cluttered environment or reinforcement learning training) without damage to the hardware or the environment.

RMF-Owl: A Collision-Tolerant Flying Robot for Autonomous Subterranean Exploration

“…Focusing on particularly lightweight protective designs, the authors in [17][18][19] present novel origami shroud designs. Emphasizing both compliance and the ability to re-orient in case of a crash and fall on the ground, the works in [20,21] present tensegrity-based soft collision-tolerant flying robots. Departing from multirotor and broadly rotorcraft designs, the contributions in [22,23] present collision-tolerant fixed-wing designs including bioinspired shape-morphing for higher protection when not flying.…”

A collision-resilient aerial vehicle with icosahedron tensegrity structure

“…The authors are with the HiPeRLab, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. {jiaming_zha,wuxiangyu,rdimick, mwm}@berkeley.edu 1) Protecting the vehicle with external structures like propeller guards [4], [5] or shells [6], [7], [8], [9], [10]. 2) Increasing the energy absorption ability of vehicle parts like propellers and arms [11], [12].…”