Bird-inspired dynamic grasping and perching in arboreal environments
Abstract
Birds take off and land on a wide range of complex surfaces. In contrast, current robots are limited in their ability to dynamically grasp irregular objects. Leveraging recent findings on how birds take off, land, and grasp, we developed a biomimetic robot that can dynamically perch on complex surfaces and grasp irregular objects. To accommodate high-speed collisions, the robot’s two legs passively transform impact energy into grasp force, while the underactuated grasping mechanism wraps around irregularly shaped objects in less than 50 milliseconds. To determine the range of hardware design, kinematic, behavior, and perch parameters that are sufficient for perching success, we launched the robot at tree branches. The results corroborate our mathematical model, which shows that larger isometrically scaled animals and robots must accommodate disproportionately larger angular momenta, relative to their mass, to achieve similar landing performance. We find that closed-loop balance control serves an important role in maximizing the range of parameters sufficient for perching. The performance of the robot’s biomimetic features attests to the functionality of their avian counterparts, and the robot enables us to study aspects of bird legs in ways that are infeasible in vivo. Our data show that pronounced differences in modern avian toe arrangements do not yield large changes in perching performance, suggesting that arboreal perching does not represent a strong selection pressure among common bird toe topographies. These findings advance our understanding of the avian perching apparatus and highlight design concepts that enable robots to perch on natural surfaces for environmental monitoring.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Science Robotics
Volume 6 | Issue 61
December 2021
December 2021
Copyright
Copyright © 2021 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works.
This is an article distributed under the terms of the Science Journals Default License.
Submission history
Received: 31 May 2021
Accepted: 3 November 2021
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank J. E. Low for assembling the aerial quadrotor platform used in this work and for contributing to early pilot tests. We would also like to thank E. Chang and E. Pelos for feedback on the robot design, experimental setups, and ideas in this manuscript. We would like to thank D. Chin for insight into how birds take off and land. Last, we are grateful to K. Rogers (CDFW) and C. Battistone (CDFW) for help with acquiring the peregrine falcon cadavers.
Funding: This research was supported by AFOSR DESI award number FA9550-18-1-0525 with special thanks to B. L. Lee, F. A. Leve, and J. L. Cambier for leading the program. In addition, W.R.T.R. was supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (DGE-114747), and D.L. was supported by grant NSF CAREER Award 1552419.
Author contributions: W.R.T.R. designed and constructed the grasping mechanism. W.R.T.R. assembled the robot components. All authors contributed feedback on the robot and experimental setup design. W.R.T.R. conducted all data collection and data analysis. W.R.T.R. made the figures, and W.R.T.R and D.L. wrote the paper. All authors reviewed the paper and contributed feedback. D.L. and M.R.C. contributed advice and supervised the work.
Competing interests: The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Data and materials availability: All data needed to evaluate the conclusions in the paper are present in the paper or the Supplementary Materials.
Authors
Funding Information
National Science Foundation: DGE-114747
National Science Foundation: MCE-16-17-4.3
National Science Foundation: 1552419
Air Force Office of Scientific Research: FA9550-18-1-0525
Air Force Office of Scientific Research: FA9550-18-1-0525
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