Wearable Drone as a Fall Arresting Device: Preliminary Concept and Feasibility Analysis

Falls from heights are one of the most prevalent work-related accidents leading to death or permanent disability. To tackle this long-standing challenge, wearable robotics has emerged as a promising technology, offering advanced solutions that account for usability and domain applicability. In this paper, we propose a novel mechanism using a drone robot as a wearable backpack for arresting falls from heights ≥ 10m. The feasibility of the solution is investigated through a point-mass dynamic simulation as well as experimental validation of the thrust model with a motor-propeller setup. The simulations demonstrate that with a 10kg wearable drone, the fall impact velocity can be reduced to a safe level (5m/s). Drone activation time is noted as a critical challenge, and to address that, an additional mechanism based on cold gas thrusters (CGTs) is integrated into the wearable backpack. The ejecting pressurized cold gas of CGTs generates a reaction force against gravity and working in tandem with the drone, the thruster is active in the initial phase of the fall, providing the drone sufficient time to achieve maximum thrust. Dynamic simulations across various falling scenarios validate the effectiveness of this approach. The drone and CGT combination increases the activation time by about 0.66s, while achieving a safe impact velocity of ≤ 5m/s.