Perching UAV sticks to walls
[From BotJunkie]
Check out this awesome perching UAV, developed by Alexis Lussier Desbiens.
“A flock of small, unmanned air vehicles flies quietly into a city, maneuvering among the buildings. They communicate as they search for places to land, not on streets or flat rooftops but on the sides of buildings and under the eaves, where they can cling, bat or insect-like, in safety and obscurity. Upon identifying landing sites, each flier turns toward a wall, executes an intentional stall and, as it begins to fall, attaches itself using feet equipped with miniature spines that engage small asperities on the surface. Using its propeller in combination with its limbs, the flier can creep along the wall and reorient for a better view. With opposed pairs of spines, the flier clings tenaciously to resist gusts of wind and ride out inclement weather. The fliers stay attached for hours or days, consuming little power and emitting no sound as they monitor the area. When finished, they launch themselves with a jump and become airborne again, ready for their next mission.”
As you can see from the vid, the UAV uses little spines like Spinybot as opposed to a sticky material like Stickybot. At this point, spines are much more effective at adhering to rough surfaces, while the synthetic gecko toe material only really sticks to smooth surfaces (unlike geckos themselves). Despite the differences between the two sticking technologies, the challenges to stickiness are similar: you need pliable toes that can individually conform to a surface at a specific angle, and if you don’t get that, you lose sticking efficiency and (possibly) your robot.
Alexis and his partners will be presenting their paper on perching UAVs at ICRA next month.
-
Comment by mook on April 26, 2010 at 11:50am -
Nice. wonder what kind of materials this works on
-
Comment by A. Rafael Ptacnik on April 26, 2010 at 6:11pm -
i wonder how many pay load can you put on it and in how weather friendly it is
-
Comment by Jack Crossfire on April 26, 2010 at 6:11pm -
In exchange for a tenured professor position, we offer to get Stanford a camera that does slow motion.
-
Comment by A. Rafael Ptacnik on April 26, 2010 at 6:14pm
-
LOL
-
Comment by Greg Fletcher on April 26, 2010 at 6:35pm -
This is really cool. This is what happens when MIT or Stanford geeks get RC planes and grants from DARPA.
-
Comment by corey on April 26, 2010 at 7:14pm -
1:27 hahaha if you turn up the volume, i think you can hear him cry a faint "this is sparta!" just before he hucks it into the wall
-
Comment by passunca on April 26, 2010 at 9:00pm -
The payload depends on the amount of spines. hundredths of these spines were used in a tv show called "prototype this" to make a human climb a concrete wall.
Comment
Social Networking
Top Content
Contests
Season Two of the Trust Time Trial (T3) Contest has now begun. The fourth round is an accuracy round for multicopters, which requires contestants to fly a cube. The deadline is April 14th.A list of all T3 contests is here.
Groups
-
ArduCopter Italian Group
87 members
-
ArduCopter User Group
1288 members
-
Agricultural UAVs
125 members
-
techpod users
39 members
-
Queensland
4 members
Advertisement
© 2013 Created by Chris Anderson.
Powered by
You need to be a member of DIY Drones to add comments!
Join DIY Drones