Head First Perching For Micro Air Vehicles
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Wednesday, 30 of June , 2010 at 1:47 am
Back in April, we posted about a micro UAV from Stanford University that uses spines to land and perch on vertical surfaces. In order to do this, the UAV has to sense its proximity to the surface and then execute a well timed pitch up and stall maneuver. This approach is fairly complex, at least when you compare it to the system under development at EPFL, which basically involves the UAV just smashing headfirst into whatever it wants to perch on.
Mirko Kovac, the same guy who came up with the jumping locust robot, attached some very sharp needles to the nose of a micro UAV. The needles deploy on impact, and are capable of sticking the aircraft to wood and even concrete. To detach, a small motor withdraws the needles, and the MAV detaches and takes flight. The attachment technique is about as simple as it gets, although arguably, this is outweighed by the reliance on the motor to detach, especially since the motor is dead weight the rest of the time. On the other hand, if you don’t get the perch right, the efficiency of your detach technique doesn’t matter in the least.
The big advantage of a perching robot is, of course, that you get all the mobility of a flying platform along with the endurance of a stationary platform. People working on these things talk about the robots being used to help people during natural disasters, which is nice and all, but the subtext is definitely about surveillance. Besides, that’s where the funding is. And there’s not anything wrong with that, it’s just the way it is.
Kovac plans to combine this perching technology with his flying jumping robot to make an awesome flying, jumping, perching robot of awesomeness.
Comments (1)
Category: Research
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Comment by How To Stop Smoking Weed
Made Tuesday, 22 of November , 2011 at 12:14 pm
You have observed very interesting details ! ps nice website . “The appearance of right oft leads us wrong.” by Horace.
