Bumper Drone: Elastic Morphology Design for Aerial Physical Interaction

TL;DR

This paper introduces a drone with elastic horns that passively manage contact forces during physical interactions, enabling stable proximity navigation and contact manipulation without active obstacle avoidance.

Contribution

The study presents a novel elastic horn design for drones that passively absorbs impact and stabilizes contact interactions, enhancing aerial physical interaction capabilities.

Findings

Elastic horns reduce pitch oscillations by 38% compared to rigid horns.

Lower horn arrangement reduces pitch oscillations by approximately 54%.

The drone maintains stability during sustained contact with static objects.

Abstract

Aerial robots are evolving from avoiding obstacles to exploiting the environmental contact interactions for navigation, exploration and manipulation. A key challenge in such aerial physical interactions lies in handling uncertain contact forces on unknown targets, which typically demand accurate sensing and active control. We present a drone platform with elastic horns that enables touch-and-go manoeuvres - a self-regulated, consecutive bumping motion that allows the drone to maintain proximity to a wall without relying on active obstacle avoidance. It leverages environmental interaction as a form of embodied control, where low-level stabilisation and near-obstacle navigation emerge from the passive dynamic responses of the drone-obstacle system that resembles a mass-spring-damper system. Experiments show that the elastic horn can absorb impact energy while maintaining vehicle stability, reducing pitch oscillations by 38% compared to the rigid horn configuration. The lower horn arrangement was found to reduce pitch oscillations by approximately 54%. In addition to intermittent contact, the platform equipped with elastic horns also demonstrates stable, sustained contact with static objects, relying on a standard attitude PID controller.