Design and Experiment of a Deformable Bird-inspired UAV Perching Mechanism

Abstract

Energy consumption and acoustic noise can be significantly reduced through perching in the sustained flights of small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). However, the existing flying perching robots lack good adaptability or loading capacity in unstructured environments. Aiming at solving these problems, a deformable UAV perching mechanism with strong adaptability and high loading capacity, which is inspired by the structure and movements of birds' feet, is presented in this paper. Three elastic toes, an inverted crank slider mechanism used to realize the opening and closing movements, and a gear mechanism used to deform between two configurations are included in this mechanism. With experiments on its performance towards different objects, Results show that it can perch on various objects reliably, and its payload is more than 15 times its weight. By integrating it with a quadcopter, it can perch on different types of targets in outdoor environments, such as tree branches, cables, eaves, and spherical lamps. In addition, the energy consumption of the UAV perching system when perching on objects can be reduced to 0.015 times that of hovering.