Hi everyone, here is a video of a new perching drone that we developped, called S-MAD (Sherbrooke's Multimodal Autonomous Drone).

It's the first fixed-wing drone that autonomously perches and takes off from vertical surfaces, both indoors and outdoors. This kind of ability enables small UAVs to perform extended missions, offering new types of applications. Ultimately, such bird-inspired platforms could be used for long duration surveillance, energy harvesting, inspection of structures or reconfigurable sensor networks.

We also have a paper on this with more detail, available on Springer.

Cheers,

Dino