Design and Control of a Perching Drone Inspired by the Prey-Capturing Mechanism of Venus Flytrap
Ye Li, Daming Liu, Yanhe Zhu, Junming zhang, Yongsheng Luo, Ziqi Wang, Chenyu Liu, Jie Zhao
AI summary
Problem
Existing drone perching mechanisms struggle with slow response times, limited target adaptability, and instability when encountering external disturbances during unstructured perching.
Approach
The team engineered a bistable metal strip mechanism that stores and rapidly releases elastic energy to mimic the Venus flytrap's snap, integrated with a cascaded extended high-gain observer to continuously estimate and cancel flight and impact disturbances.
Key results
- Perching mechanism achieves rapid closure in under 100 milliseconds
- Cascaded EHGO control successfully estimates and compensates for real-time wind and impact disturbances
- Mechanism adapts to varying target diameters, thicknesses, and materials
- Experimental validation confirms superior stability and adaptability over conventional rigid or passive perching systems
Why it matters
Extends drone mission endurance and operational reliability in complex, unstructured environments for search-and-rescue and reconnaissance tasks.
Abstract
The endurance and energy efficiency of drones remain critical challenges in their design and operation. To extend mission duration, numerous studies explored perching mechanisms that enable drones to conserve energy by temporar- ily suspending flight. This paper presents a new perching drone that utilizes an active flexible perching mechanism inspired by the rapid predation mechanism of the Venus flytrap, achieving perching in less than 100 ms. The proposed system is designed for high-speed adaptability to the perching targets. The overall drone design is outlined, followed by the development and validation of the biomimetic perching structure. To enhance the system stability, a cascade extended high-gain observer (EHGO) based control method is developed, which can estimate and compensate for the external disturbance in real time. The experimental results demonstrate the adaptability of the perching structure and the superiority of the cascaded EHGO in resisting wind and perching disturbances.