Exploring aerial perching and grasping with dual symmetric manipulators and compliant end-effectors

Abstract

Inspired by talon of a predator bird, this paper presents a quadrotor with two 2-Degree of Freedoms (DOFs) compliant manipulators which could mimic bird perching and grasping. The symmetric configuration of the manipulators causes minimum shift in center of gravity and a minimum disturbance to the angular momentum of the platform during grasping and perching maneuvers. Thus, the dynamics of the manipulator is independent to that of the platform. Moreover, a compliant end-effector is introduced to decouple the dynamics of the unmanned aerial vehicles from the force interaction with the environment or target objects. Therefore, aerial manipulation problem is significantly simplified due to the minimum amount of disturbance among components. In addition, the manipulators could function as the landing gear, which allows larger work envelope, weight saving and less landing impact. It also has the potential to achieve a birdlike "perch and watch" to increase the endurance of unmanned aerial vehicles in missions that involve extended endurance.

Bird-inspired dynamic grasping and perching in arboreal environments

“…Several bird-inspired perching mechanisms did not demonstrate successful takeoff and landing (16)(17)(18)(19). Other grasping mechanisms can pick up different stationary objects (20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29)(30) or catch objects launched at them (28,31,32). Some demonstrated vertical or near-vertical landings on irregular or cylindrical surfaces (21,29,31,(33)(34)(35)(36)(37)(38)(39)(40), including posed branches and a single tree branch (34).…”

“…Other grasping mechanisms can pick up different stationary objects (20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29)(30) or catch objects launched at them (28,31,32). Some demonstrated vertical or near-vertical landings on irregular or cylindrical surfaces (21,29,31,(33)(34)(35)(36)(37)(38)(39)(40), including posed branches and a single tree branch (34). Whereas some birds are capable of landing vertically in a slow hovering flight fashion, most of the time, they make a dynamically controlled collision.…”

Hitchhiker: A Quadrotor Aggressively Perching on a Moving Inclined Surface Using Compliant Suction Cup Gripper

“…M ICRO Aerial Vehicles (MAVs), specifically quadrotors suffer from limited battery power, which significantly restricts their operational time and range [1]. Perching on a surface could be helpful in energy preserving by cutting the power of motors and thus extends the operation time [2], [3]. Therefore, the latest years have seen a growing interest of the research community towards the perching of MAVs [4]- [6].…”

An implementation framework for vision-based bat-like inverted perching with bi-directionalthrust quadrotor

“…This phenomena is similar to a helicopter landing on a ship and is discussed in literature such as. 1 To mimic this bat-like maneuver, a bi-directional thrust quadrotor has been proposed. The flight envelope of a quadrotor is easily doubled with bi-directional thrust using simple fixed-pitch propellers which can be reversed to achieve stable flight in either upright or inverted modes.…”