A latching system for a perching UAV

Abstract

Rotary Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), due to their versatility in operating at enclosed areas, allows them to be very useful for surveillance applications. The only shortcoming of rotary UAVs is the significantly less payload to range ratio. The development of perching UAVs have been critical in extending the operation time of the UAVs by allowing the rotors to be powered down when ‘perched’, thus allowing for extending periods of surveillance at the perched location. This report presents the improvements developed for an existing perching mechanism designed by previous Final Year Project students. The major improvements are the addition of latching system and a differential gripper system integrated together into an improved perching mechanism design. The addition of both systems allow for a longer operation time than the previous design, as well as the ability to perch on varying diameter perches. Further improvements can be done by integrating the micro controller boards of both perching mechanism and quad-rotor into a single board to provide a feedback system to improve the damping of the system. A section of this report presents an experiment to analyze the perching behavior of birds that was accomplished through the assistance of Flightmasters that provided trained birds for the experiment. The process of the experiment as well as the observations and recommendations for future experiments is also presented.

Rotary Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), due to their versatility in operating at enclosed areas, allows them to be very useful for surveillance applications. The only shortcoming of rotary UAVs is the significantly less payload to range ratio. The development of perching UAVs have been critical in extending the operation time of the UAVs by allowing the rotors to be powered down when ‘perched’, thus allowing for extending periods of surveillance at the perched location. This report presents the improvements developed for an existing perching mechanism designed by previous Final Year Project students. The major improvements are the addition of latching system and a differential gripper system integrated together into an improved perching mechanism design. The addition of both systems allow for a longer operation time than the previous design, as well as the ability to perch on varying diameter perches. Further improvements can be done by integrating the micro controller boards of both perching mechanism and quad-rotor into a single board to provide a feedback system to improve the damping of the system. A section of this report presents an experiment to analyze the perching behavior of birds that was accomplished through the assistance of Flightmasters that provided trained birds for the experiment. The process of the experiment as well as the observations and recommendations for future experiments is also presented.