Title
ALBERO: Agile Landing on Branches for Environmental Robotics Operations
Author
Zheng, L. (TU Delft Control & Simulation)
Hamaza, S. (TU Delft Control & Simulation)
Date
2024
Abstract
Drones have been increasingly used in various domains, including ecological monitoring in forests. However, the endurance and noise of drones have limited their deployment to short flight missions above canopies. To address these limitations, we introduce ALBERO: a framework comprising a mechanical solution and an optimal planner to realise agile quadrotor perching on tree branches of steep incline. The gripper features an ultra-fast active mechanism inspired by birds' claws that enables quadrotors to perch swiftly on randomly-oriented tree branches. By perching, the drone can preserve energy for extended periods of time, while silently gathering forest data in the canopy. The intrinsic properties of the gripper allow for extra flexibility in size, surface roughness and shape imperfections of natural perches, such as those found in the wild. The gripper also has good scalability properties and can be easily matched to different drones' sizes. The biggest advantage of this novel design lays in its ability to close reactively and ultra-fast (67ms) on the large gripper, 42ms on the small gripper), enabling the quadrotor to perform agile perching manoeuvres from different angles and at different approach speeds. ALBERO's software module comprises of a trajectory planning algorithm adapted for branch perching, ensuring that the drone can perch on inclined cylindrical targets from any starting location in the proximity of the branch. These requirements translate in stringent positioning and orientation accuracy, but they enable the drone to land dynamically from a variety of positions within the forest.
Subject
Agile Motion Planning
Agile Perching
Drones
Environmental Monitoring
Gears
Gripper Design
Grippers
Quadrotors
Servomotors
Springs
Steel
UAVs Applications
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http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:4f72ee48-af59-4442-9768-69c1133ef133
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/LRA.2024.3349914
Embargo date
2024-07-08
ISSN
2377-3766
Source
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 9 (3), 2845-2852
Bibliographical note
Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.
Part of collection
Institutional Repository
Document type
journal article
Rights
© 2024 L. Zheng, S. Hamaza