Design and Control of an Autonomous Bat-like Perching UAV

Abstract

Perching allows small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to maintain their altitude while significantly extending their flight duration and reducing noise. However, current research on flying habitats is poorly adapted to unstructured environments, and lacks autonomous capabilities, requiring ideal experimental environments and remote control by personnel. To solve these problems, in this paper, we propose a bat-like UAV perching mechanism by investigating the bat upside-down perching method, which realizes double self-locking in the perching state using the ratchet and four-link dead point mechanisms. Based on this perching mechanism, this study proposes a control strategy for UAVs to track targets and accomplish flight perching autonomously by combining a binocular camera, single-point LiDAR, and pressure sensors. Autonomous perching experiments were conducted for crossbar-type objects outdoors. The experimental results show that a multirotor UAV equipped with the perching mechanism and sensors can reliably achieve autonomous flight perching and re-flying off the target outdoors. The power consumption is reduced to 2.9% of the hovering state when perched on the target object.