If a ladybug lands upside down, it will use its elytra to balance and then right itself in no timA research team at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland was inspired to create the same kind of advantage for fixed-wing drones.
Lead by doctoral assistant Charalampos Vourtsis, the team developed a drone that mimics this technique using actuators and a set of artificial elytra.
“Similar to the insect, the artificial elytra feature degrees of freedom that allow them to reorient the vehicle if it flips over or lands upside down,” Vourtsis said.
They found that the drones were able to self-right themselves using a set of 17-centimeter elytra in every scenario except on a very steep incline and on grass and sand. The team also found that the elytra added non-negligible lift during flight, offsetting their weight.
Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) are being used in a wide range of applications such as surveillance, reconnaissance, inspection, and search and rescue. However, due to their size and mission profiles, they are prone to tipping over, jeopardizing their operation. Self-righting is an open challenge for fixed-wing drones since existing research focuses on terrestrial and multicopter flying robots with solutions that increase drag and structural weight.
Until now, solutions for winged drones remained unexplored. Inspired by beetles, we propose a robust and elegant solution where we retrofit a fixed-wing drone with a set of additional wings akin to beetles shell structured wings called elytra.
We show that artificial elytra provide additional lift during flight to mitigate their structural weight while also being able to self-right the MAV when it has been flipped over. We performed simulations along with dynamic and aerodynamic experiments to validate our results.
Source: Laboratory of Intelligent Systems (LIS) École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)