A Soft-Bodied Aerial Robot for Collision Resilience and Contact-Reactive Perching

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Nguyen, Pham H., Patnaik, Karishma, Mishra, Shatadal, Polygerinos, Panagiotis, Zhang, Wenlong
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2022
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author Nguyen, Pham H.
Patnaik, Karishma
Mishra, Shatadal
Polygerinos, Panagiotis
Zhang, Wenlong
author_facet Nguyen, Pham H.
Patnaik, Karishma
Mishra, Shatadal
Polygerinos, Panagiotis
Zhang, Wenlong
contents 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 light-weight, 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 3D 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.
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institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Soft-Bodied Aerial Robot for Collision Resilience and Contact-Reactive Perching
Nguyen, Pham H.
Patnaik, Karishma
Mishra, Shatadal
Polygerinos, Panagiotis
Zhang, Wenlong
Robotics
Systems and Control
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 light-weight, 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 3D 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.
title A Soft-Bodied Aerial Robot for Collision Resilience and Contact-Reactive Perching
topic Robotics
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.13155