Video: Cat-clawed drone is the first to land on near-vertical ice walls
The Ice Dart is a quadcopter designed by researchers at the Université de Sherbrooke in Quebec to solve a problem that has quietly limited drone science for years: there's almost nowhere safe to land in the harshest environments on Earth.
Ice is especially bad. Standard rubber-footed drones start losing grip on slopes as gentle as 9 degrees, and the steeper the slope gets, the less of the drone's own weight presses it into the surface – on a 60-degree wall, gravity only pins the aircraft down with half its usual force. The Ice Dart flips that problem, becoming – according to the team's new paper in IEEE Transactions on Field Robotics – the first drone able to perch on ice that steep and hold its position.
The Ice Dart belongs to a broader push in robotics called perching, an approach borrowed from nature that tries to give drones the ability...
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