Posted on 05/06/2019 8:27:07 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Small drones can do big jobs: Firefighters can use them to find hot spots in blazes, environmental monitors can find the source of hazardous chemical leaks. One just delivered a human kidney for transplant surgery.
But it takes lots of power to spin four helicopter blades fast enough to keep a quadcopter-type drone in the air. Most can only stay aloft for about 30 minutes.
So an international team of roboticists is trying to extend the time a drone can stay on the job. For inspiration, they turned to birds.
"Birds usually fly somewhere and they stay at the top of the roof or some tree branches," says Kaiyu Hang a roboticist at Yale University. "Then they look for their prey or they just stay there without flapping their wings all the time and they can still observe what is happening around them."
And observing takes a lot less energy than flying.
Hang and his colleagues developed a claw-like landing system that lets a drone grab on to a branch or pole, turn off its engines and continue to make observations while it's perched. Hang describes his work in the journal Science Robotics.
The team's new system also provides a way of landing even when there isn't a good place to land.
"We have developed a modularized landing gear framework that allows the drone to not only perch on some structures, but also rest on some structures when perching is not possible," Hang says.
By resting, Hang means the quadcopter can essentially lean against a ledge and stay there using just two of its four rotors — saving energy.
The ability to perch can be handy for a number of other reasons, too.
"If you perch, for example, underneath a bridge or underneath the eaves of a building you can ride out storms or bad weather that would make it hard to fly," says Stanford University's Mark Cutkosky.
The new landing system Hang and his colleagues have invented does have some drawbacks. For one thing, it adds weight to the drone. That means it takes more energy to keep the drone aloft.
"So there had better be a good trade-off in terms of really improving mission time in order to pay for that added weight," Cutkosky says.
And for now, a human has to fly the drone onto the perch site.
To make the landing system really useful, the drone would be able to land on its own. So the question is "what sorts of strategies can we use that would allow this system to discover perch-able sites?" Cutkosky says.
The Yale team has already begun integrating the drone's computer with its on-board camera, so it might not be too long before drones are able to decide on their own where to settle down for a rest.
Regards,
Interesting idea, just getting one or two claws around a power line and hanging down might be useful and fairly easy.
Put an inductive pickup in the claw and it could literally hang out, observe, and recharge.
Clearly it is not because the drone is tired.
So AI to a degree to find and mount the charging source which would make a drone independent of the operator for a delivery or scout operation.
What could go wrong here?
Maybe a light rail gun for self-defense against predators. Acrobatic flight so it can be aimed 360 (just in case it is necessary, you know). Can anyone spell 'Sky-net'?
Hanging from a power line could recharge a
batteries, using the “standing waves” generated by power flowing through the lines.
Falconry, the original “drone.”
“If you perch, for example, underneath a bridge or underneath the eaves of a building you can ride out storms or bad weather that would make it hard to fly,”
“Bird brained”
Maybe they can come up with some “hare brained” ideas for ground drones too.
Part of a course I taught many years ago. I referred to them as parasitic UAVs.
Why not tether to a helium or hydrogen filled mother ship?
A stealth mini drone dirigible. With adaptive video camera technology. It looks just like a puff of cloud.
One of the first “robots” was designed to motor down a hallway and look for electric outlets. When it found one, it would plug in and recharge. That was all it did, but in its day it was pretty cool. It used a lot of energy, so it had to journey from outlet to outlet as it were.
This idea seems like a natural, and likely will become an app that is useful in a lot of drone designs.
I think drones need to be able to fly like a plane as well as a helicopter. Fixed-wing flight is much more efficient.
Birds do both.
Birdrone,,,
Yup
Perching is NOT flying !
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