Modeling and Simulation of Perching With a Quadrotor Aerial Robot With Passive Bio-inspired Legs and Feet

Perching in unmanned aerial vehicles is appealing for reconnaissance, monitoring, communications, and charging. This paper focuses on modeling, simulation, and control of bioinspired perching in unmanned aerial vehicles on cylindrical objects, which will be used for future planning and control research. A modular approach is taken where the quadrotor, legs, feet, and toes are modeled separately and then integrated to form a complete simulation system. New models of these components consider kinematics and dynamics of each element and their coupling through tendons that provide actuation. The integrated model is assembled to simulate a physical prototype and then validated based upon physical experiments to provide calibration. Simulation results evaluate the validated model performing perching with different gripper-perch alignments. The simulation environment developed in this research provides a foundation to research control approaches for use with the discussed passive perching mechanism. The simulation was validated to capture the dynamics of the real perching mechanism. This platform will be used in future work to develop a control approach that will be implemented in a quadrotor system to land and take-off from a perch in a reliable manner.