Unified Switching between Active Flying and Perching of a Bioinspired Robot Using Impedance Control

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.

Touchdown to take-off: at the interface of flight and surface locomotion

“…Many of these surfaces are vertically oriented and hard, and a subset, including glass and metal surfaces, have a very low rugosity. Attachment of robots and animals to these surfaces requires close surface proximity using an adhesive pad or a suction seal (figure 3c,g,k,l,p) [42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50]. Other relatively hard and vertically oriented surfaces include brick, concrete and stucco with many asperities formed by holes and bumps, which facilitate the use of spines (figure 3b,f,j,o) [18,41,[51][52][53][54].…”

“…Under such conditions, aerial robots must exert substantial forces to remain attached or navigate along the surface. Surface attachment solutions include grasping, claws, adhesive pads and suction [18,[41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59]. Some prototypes have begun to navigate surfaces with these techniques [41,44,[139][140][141].…”

“…These attributes make these adhesives appropriate for vertical and steeply inclined surfaces (figure 3c,k,l) [42][43][44][45][46][47]. Suction cups forming seals have been demonstrated to work for smooth, non-porous surfaces (figure 3g,p) [48][49][50] and require reliable vacuum pumps for continued attachment.…”

“…While many robots can perform individual modes of locomotion reliably, transitions between modes remain a challenge. In the past few years, several robots have been developed that can perform aerial approaches, landings, surface locomotion and take-offs [18,[41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59]. The simplest case of landing and locomotion is interacting with flat, horizontal ground.…”

“…The landing and take-off manoeuvres of aerial robots on steep and inclined surfaces are highly interdependent. Landings of present aerial robots typically involve one of three manoeuvres: pitch-up, direct approach or inversion (figure 3) [18,[41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59]. Each manoeuvre has specific trade-offs in required situational awareness, aerodynamic control and force on the attachment mechanism to enable landing and perching.…”