A Flexible Exoskeleton for Collision Resilience

TL;DR

This paper introduces a lightweight, customizable exoskeleton for quadcopters inspired by arthropod shells, which passively absorbs impact energy, enhancing collision resilience without sacrificing payload capacity.

Contribution

The authors present a simple, low-cost, easily manufactured exoskeleton design that significantly improves impact absorption and resilience in autonomous quadcopters.

Findings

Five-fold increase in passive energy absorption

Able to survive multiple collisions

Suitable for high-risk activities with minimal damage

Abstract

With inspiration from arthropods' exoskeletons, we designed a simple, easily manufactured, semi-rigid structure with flexible joints that can passively damp impact energy. This exoskeleton fuses the protective shell to the main robot structure, thereby minimizing its loss in payload capacity. Our design is simple to build and customize using cheap components and consumer-grade 3D printers. Our results show we can build a sub-250g, autonomous quadcopter with visual navigation that can survive multiple collisions, shows a five-fold increase in the passive energy absorption, that is also suitable for automated battery swapping, and with enough computing power to run deep neural network models. This structure makes for an ideal platform for high-risk activities (such as flying in a cluttered environment or reinforcement learning training) without damage to the hardware or the environment.