Abstract
Currently, a bottleneck problem for battery-powered microflying robots is time of endurance. Inspired by flying animal behavior in nature, an innovative mechanism with active flying and perching in the three-dimensional space was proposed to greatly increase mission life and more importantly execute tasks perching on an object in the stationary way. In prior work, we have developed some prototypes of flying and perching robots. However, when the robots switch between flying and perching, it is a challenging issue to deal with the contact between the robot and environment under the traditional position control without considering the stationary obstacle and external force. Therefore, we propose a unified impedance control approach for bioinspired flying and perching robots to smoothly contact with the environment. The dynamic model of the bioinspired robot is deduced, and the proposed impedance control method is employed to control the contact force and displacement with the environment. Simulations including the top perching and side perching and the preliminary experiments were conducted to validate the proposed method. Both simulation and experimental results validate the feasibility of the proposed control methods for controlling a bioinspired flying and perching robot.
Highlights
With the increasing missions requirements in the air space, the flying robots have been widely used in all kinds of fields
The results demonstrate that the impedance control can handle the external contact without generating excessive interaction forces
The bioinspired active flying and perching robot has many applications and market potentials because it can increase the time of endurance greatly, about ten times and even hundreds of times longer than typical battery-powered flying robots
Summary
With the increasing missions requirements in the air space, the flying robots have been widely used in all kinds of fields. The energy efficiency of such animals is much higher than that of flying robots It is useful for small fixed-wing planes to perch on vertical surfaces such as cliffs or the walls of buildings [4]. The existing challenging issue is to control the switching process between flying and perching on an object surface that may cause robots breakdown. We propose a model based impedance control method to address the issue for the bioinspired active flying and perching robot. We extend the impedance control to our developed active flying and adhesion robot control system, which has an active adsorption device and the adhesion force and switching process are controllable so that it is suitable for all kinds of objects surfaces and applications.
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