Image: Vimeo
Tiny, insect-like drones with their limited power supplies can have a hard time staying aloft for extended periods of time, but thanks to a Harvard research team, these flying critters can now hang loose. Using electrostatic adhesion, Harvard’s RoboBee is designed to stick to the underside of trees and buildings to conserve energy and remain at a vantage point. RoboBee is an effort to make small drones suitable for applications requiring prolonged flight time. Applications such as land mapping, industrial inspection, and covert surveillance require drones to stay airborne, but what if drones could perch up top instead?
Nature has a proven track record for dishing out what doesn’t work and latching onto what does. The team of Harvard researchers found that birds, bats, and insects latch onto tree branches, leaves, and flowers through talons or sticky adhesives, and these options have proved themselves viable, but for a drone like RoboBee, they don’t work. Enter electrostatic adhesion.
Image: Science
Electrostatic adhesion occurs when oppositely charged surfaces stick, and it’s why a balloon will stick to a wall after you rub it in your hair. For the RoboBee, it’s the perfect solution for perching. Electrostatic adhesion requires 1,000 times less energy to perch than to hover, and sheds the need for any actuated parts that would be challenging to manufacture on such a small scale. Actuated parts such as servo-driven microspines work well on larger drones, but they’re impractical on RoboBee.
Harvard researchers developed RoboBee using the same design pioneered in Harvard’s Microrobotics Lab, but they’ve added an electrostatic pad to provide the adhesion. The pad is devised from copper electrodes, polymers, and carbon fiber structures. A foam tube mounts the pad to the RoboBee to provide compliant and dampening effects when the drone latches onto a surface; it’s flexible like an ear plug and allows RoboBee to approach a surface at any angle rather than parallel. The researchers found that, when charged, the pad can stick RoboBee to glass, brick, and leaves. To detach, the power is switched off.
Simply put, batteries add considerable weight to a drone yet provide no more than twenty to thirty minutes of flight. Perching via electrostatic adhesion, on the other hand, doesn’t require nearly as much power as flying, and it would allow small drones like the RoboBee to just perch and observe.
There are still limitations to RoboBee. Power and control aren’t integrated into RoboBee but are sent via wires. In addition, RoboBee can only perch on ceilings, overhangs, and nothing sideways. The team at Harvard hopes that they’ll address these problems in a future RoboBee, but it could be a decade before RoboBee goes wireless outside the lab.
Source: Science Via: Wyss Institute The Verge
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