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Thrust-Assisted Perching and Climbing for a Bioinspired UAV

  • Morgan T. PopeEmail author
  • Mark R. Cutkosky
Conference paper
First Online:
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 9793)

Abstract

We present a multi-modal robot that flies, perches and climbs on outdoor surfaces such as concrete or stucco walls. Although the combination of flying and climbing mechanisms in a single platform extracts a weight penalty, it also provides synergies. In particular, a small amount of aerodynamic thrust can substantially improve the reliability of perching and climbing, allowing the platform to maneuver on otherwise risky surfaces. The approach is inspired by thrust-assisted perching and climbing observed in various animals including flightless birds.

Keywords

Vertical Surface Locomotory Mode Rotor Thrust Climbing Mechanism Flightless Bird 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Notes

Acknowledgements

Support for this work was provided by NSF IIS-1161679 and ARL MAST MCE 15-4. We gratefully acknowledge the help of H. Jiang, C. Kimes, W. Roderick and C. Kerst in conducting experiments.

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Copyright information

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Stanford UniversityStanfordUSA

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