Ground Mobility and Landing Gear for a Bird-Sized Perching Micro Air Vehicle (MAV)

Current MAV platforms suffer from lack of a landing gear that enables perching and ground mobility to support Recharging (or Energy Harvesting) and/or Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR). Minimizing the number of actuators, while providing perching and ground mobility, is a very hard problem. To solve these challenges, Vishwa Robotics & Automation (VRA) proposes experimenting with several high level concepts for perching and Ground Mobility. We plan to build several experimental lightweight prototype mechanisms with claws and appendages, with small servo actuators, or bistable solenoids, or springs, or a combination of these technologies, to enable different modalities. For perching, we propose concepts to land on ledges and on branches and other cylindrical objects like wires. For ground mobility, we present concepts that utilize modifications of perching mechanisms to save weight to enable ambulation on branches, wires, ledges etc BENEFIT: Potential Commercial Applications include: Remote-control climbers, crawlers, flyers etc., for tasks such as bomb sniffing,emergency search & rescue, border patrol and flying perching toys.