Perching UAV Lands On Wire
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Friday, 23 of July , 2010 at 12:07 am
We’ve seen a couple different kinds of perching UAVs lately, including Stanford’s wall sticking UAV and EPFL’s head-first perching UAV. This latest UAV, from the Robot Locomotion Group at MIT’s CSAIL, is a more traditional percher, able to land itself on a wire. This is a pretty neat trick (and quite useful, considering the prevalence of wires), and since birds manage to do it all the time, it can’t possibly be that hard, right?
See? All you have to do is increase your angle of attack to such an extent that the turbulence caused by air separation behind your wings combined with the drag caused by the front of the wings brings your aircraft to a gentle, pinpoint landing. Easy!
Next? Give these planes claws to let them siphon electricity from the wires that they land on.
[ Robot Locomotion Group: Perching ]
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Category: Biorobotics,Security
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