Vision-Guided Drone Perching to Extend Surveillance Time

To save power during surveillance, birds or bats can perch and rest on branches. To date, few flapping-wing drones can perch to a branch despite being capable of flying agilely in multiple flight modes. Due to their small size and limited payload, the flight endurance and surveillance times of flapping drones were short. For example, our 63-gram prototype of the hoverable flapping drone can only hover in the air for less than 5 minutes using an 11-gram lithium polymer battery. Extra loading with a camera and grippers will further reduce the endurance by 40%. The passive perching requires no flight power. This motivated our development of a 6-gram swing hook for branch perching just like the hangar hook with a lifting strength of up to 2 kilograms. With a hook onboard, the drone can perch upside down from a branch, significantly extending the surveillance duration. In addition, we outlined the principle of how pilot vision helps to aim the hook engagement to a branch by proper leveling and approaching speed. In the future, a firstperson view could further help the flight maneuver to perch indoors.