Image: Stanford
Drones are presented with a major problem because of their low endurance and susceptibility to uneven landing zones, but Stanford’s new SCAMP or Stanford Climbing and Aerial Maneuvering Platform is designed to solve this problem through adaptive perching and vertical climbing.
SCAMP is a robotic quadcopter designed to fly, perch, climb, and recover from failure on the fly. It’s a tiny quadcopter, built on the CrazyFlie platform, equipped with lengthly legs and spiny feet to attach to and climb walls when not flying. Morgan Pope, a researcher behind the SCAMP project, is the lead author of the research paper describing SCAMP in detail. The paper is currently under review by IEEE, but Pope explains the reason behind the design.
Quadrotors have limited endurance because of restrictions on battery capacity and the physics of small-scale flight, but perching can allow them to operate for hours or even days, gathering data or performing communication tasks while stationary. Perching can be tricky, because the odds of your drone landing in just the right place are low. Adding the ability to climb allows your drone to reposition itself more accurately, with the added bonus that it works if it’s too windy for flight.
SCAMP is the effort of previous works done at the Stanford Biomimetics and Dexterous Manipulation Laboratory. The lab has a great deal of experience working with nature-mimicking robots; they’ve developed everything from perching drones to climbing robots over the past decade, and now they’ve combined their collective research to develop the highly-adaptive SCAMP.
With a drone’s low endurance due to battery life and small-scale flight limitations, their ability to stay in flight for longer durations is non-existent. SCAMP works by eliminating the need to fly by perching and climbing up vertical surfaces such as concrete and stucco.
The process goes as so: SCAMP perches to a wall by flying into it until its tail pivots the drone upwards, the legs make contact with the wall and immediately stick, and the legs are actuated back and forth to move upwards of needed. The climbing capabilities are made possible by a clever rig comprised of elastic, servo-driven legs and feet with wall-clinging barbs better known as “micro-spines.” If SCAMP misses a step, the sensors detect a rapid increase in vertical acceleration and activate the rotors to adhere SCAMP to the wall. The process repeats.
The advantages of such a system are plenty. For one, drones could endure longer missions by chilling idle on a wall collecting data and analyzing the environment. A drone that haphazardly lands and hopes for the best may not last long, but it’s a different case for a drone like SCAMP.
Source: BDML
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