TY - JOUR
T1 - A Soft-Bodied Aerial Robot for Collision Resilience and Contact-Reactive Perching
AU - Nguyen, Pham H.
AU - Patnaik, Karishma
AU - Mishra, Shatadal
AU - Polygerinos, Panagiotis
AU - Zhang, Wenlong
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.
PY - 2023/8/1
Y1 - 2023/8/1
N2 - Current aerial robots demonstrate limited interaction capabilities in unstructured environments when compared with their biological counterparts. Some examples include their inability to tolerate collisions and to successfully land or perch on objects of unknown shapes, sizes, and texture. Efforts to include compliance have introduced designs that incorporate external mechanical impact protection at the cost of reduced agility and flight time due to the added weight. In this work, we propose and develop a lightweight, inflatable, soft-bodied aerial robot (SoBAR) that can pneumatically vary its body stiffness to achieve intrinsic collision resilience. Unlike the conventional rigid aerial robots, SoBAR successfully demonstrates its ability to repeatedly endure and recover from collisions in various directions, not only limited to in-plane ones. Furthermore, we exploit its capabilities to demonstrate perching where the three-dimensional collision resilience helps in improving the perching success rates. We also augment SoBAR with a novel hybrid fabric-based bistable (HFB) grasper that can utilize impact energies to perform contact-reactive grasping through rapid shape conforming abilities. We exhaustively study and offer insights into the collision resilience, impact absorption, and manipulation capabilities of SoBAR with the HFB grasper. Finally, we compare the performance of conventional aerial robots with the SoBAR through collision characterizations, grasping identifications, and experimental validations of collision resilience and perching in various scenarios and on differently shaped objects.
AB - Current aerial robots demonstrate limited interaction capabilities in unstructured environments when compared with their biological counterparts. Some examples include their inability to tolerate collisions and to successfully land or perch on objects of unknown shapes, sizes, and texture. Efforts to include compliance have introduced designs that incorporate external mechanical impact protection at the cost of reduced agility and flight time due to the added weight. In this work, we propose and develop a lightweight, inflatable, soft-bodied aerial robot (SoBAR) that can pneumatically vary its body stiffness to achieve intrinsic collision resilience. Unlike the conventional rigid aerial robots, SoBAR successfully demonstrates its ability to repeatedly endure and recover from collisions in various directions, not only limited to in-plane ones. Furthermore, we exploit its capabilities to demonstrate perching where the three-dimensional collision resilience helps in improving the perching success rates. We also augment SoBAR with a novel hybrid fabric-based bistable (HFB) grasper that can utilize impact energies to perform contact-reactive grasping through rapid shape conforming abilities. We exhaustively study and offer insights into the collision resilience, impact absorption, and manipulation capabilities of SoBAR with the HFB grasper. Finally, we compare the performance of conventional aerial robots with the SoBAR through collision characterizations, grasping identifications, and experimental validations of collision resilience and perching in various scenarios and on differently shaped objects.
KW - collision resilient aerial robots
KW - passive dynamics
KW - perching
KW - soft aerial robots
KW - soft fabric-based robots
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85162103840&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85162103840&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1089/soro.2022.0010
DO - 10.1089/soro.2022.0010
M3 - Article
C2 - 37079376
AN - SCOPUS:85162103840
SN - 2169-5172
VL - 10
SP - 838
EP - 851
JO - Soft Robotics
JF - Soft Robotics
IS - 4
ER -