Drones Learn to Perch by Touch
For drones, staying in the air is a race against the battery. Whether inspecting infrastructure, searching disaster zones, or monitoring remote forests, flight times are usually measured in minutes rather than hours. One obvious solution is to land and wait when there is nothing to do, but that turns out to be much harder than it sounds. Perching on a tree branch, for example, requires far more precision than you might expect. Researchers at TU Delft have now demonstrated a different approach that borrows from nature, allowing a drone to feel its way onto a perch instead of relying on vision.
The team's system replaces the typical vision-based strategy with one that actively uses touchto locate and align with a target. Rather than requiring an exact model of a branch before beginning its landing sequence, the drone starts with only a rough estimate of where the perch might be...
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