Design and Experiment of a Deformable Bird-inspired UAV Perching Mechanism

Long Bai,Yupeng Deng,Yuanxi Sun,Xiaohong Chen,Liming Xin,Hao Wang,Jia Zheng

doi:10.1007/s42235-021-00098-5

Abstract

Energy consumption and acoustic noise can be significantly reduced through perching in the sustained flights of small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). However, the existing flying perching robots lack good adaptability or loading capacity in unstructured environments. Aiming at solving these problems, a deformable UAV perching mechanism with strong adaptability and high loading capacity, which is inspired by the structure and movements of birds' feet, is presented in this paper. Three elastic toes, an inverted crank slider mechanism used to realize the opening and closing movements, and a gear mechanism used to deform between two configurations are included in this mechanism. With experiments on its performance towards different objects, Results show that it can perch on various objects reliably, and its payload is more than 15 times its weight. By integrating it with a quadcopter, it can perch on different types of targets in outdoor environments, such as tree branches, cables, eaves, and spherical lamps. In addition, the energy consumption of the UAV perching system when perching on objects can be reduced to 0.015 times that of hovering.

Highlights

With the development of flight control algorithms, sensors, microprocessors, MEMS, and other related technologies, the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technology has developed rapidly
Because of its excellent properties, such as simple deployment, low maintenance cost, high maneuverability, and hovering capability, UAV has been widely used in intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance, traffic monitoring and management, search and rescue, network and communication, infrastructure inspections and many other fields [1,2,3]
Due to its size and loading limitations, there are limited onboard power supplies in the UAV, which usually results in

Summary

Introduction

With the development of flight control algorithms, sensors, microprocessors, MEMS, and other related technologies, the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technology has developed rapidly. Because of its excellent properties, such as simple deployment, low maintenance cost, high maneuverability, and hovering capability, UAV has been widely used in intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance, traffic monitoring and management, search and rescue, network and communication, infrastructure inspections and many other fields [1,2,3]. It has played a significant role in those fields. Kalantari et al, [7] presented a method that enables quadrotor Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) to autonomously perch on and take off from smooth vertical surfaces with a dry adhesive gripper, which has shown the

Objectives

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Conclusion