FURI | Spring 2022

A Soft Drone for Whole Body Perching

With the increase in demand for drones with high endurance times for surveillance operations, the current mechanisms proposed in literature include rigid graspers to help perch the drones on various objects and perform energy harvesting. This grasper mechanism has certain limitations since it cannot conform to irregular objects and also increases weight. To overcome this, we designed and demonstrated a pneumatic bending actuator arm that can perform full-body perching using compressed air in the range of 5-25 psi. The result is a novel whole-body perching drone that exploits the compliance offered by soft actuators and is also lightweight.