Landing on trees: drone holds on with wings
Landing vertically on trees, poles or pipes is a problem for drones. Researchers at EPFL have found a purely mechanical solution.
The EPFL drone can cling to trees with its wings.
(Image: EPFL)
A research team of engineers and roboticists from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) has developed a drone called PerHug, which can land on tree trunks using its wings as a gripping tool. It can also land on other vertical objects such as poles or pipes.
Drones are used for a wide range of applications, such as filming, goods deliveries, reconnaissance flights and mapping tasks. However, the drone always needs a suitable landing site, which must be horizontally aligned and level. However, this was not enough for the EPFL scientists. They wanted a drone to be able to land on vertical poles, pipes or tree stands similarly to bats, as they describe in the study "Crash-perching on vertical poles with a hugging-wing robot", which was published in Communications Engineering. The bats switch from a horizontal to a vertical flight motion and hold on with their wings as gripper arms.
The researchers transferred this to a winged drone. It has foldable wings with a locking and unlocking mechanism as well as hooks, a bistable trigger, an upward-pointing nose and a reinforced tail.
Landing instead of crashing
The drone does not require complex control mechanisms to transition from a horizontal to a vertical position. The upward-pointing nose of the drone simply pushes the entire flying object upwards when it hits the vertical landing area. A mechanical mechanism is then triggered so that the wings are unlocked in two segments. They then enclose a tree, for example, and cling to it with grappling hooks. The tail supports the drone. In their experiments, the researchers used a reinforced and an elastic front nose. Both fulfilled their purpose and led to a similar result of moving the drone into a vertical position in the event of an impact.
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The drone cannot yet fly independently. During testing, it was put into a gliding flight from the hand and thrown towards trees of different sizes and orientations. The drone managed to hold on to all the trees. Depending on the target size, orientation and approach speed, this sometimes worked better, sometimes worse.
The researchers assume that their mechanism can also be used in electric motor-driven aerial drones. One area of application would be environmental monitoring. A drone could cling to trees to collect data.
(olb)