Conceptual Design, Validation, and Optimization of an Active Material Actuated Bi-Stable Gripping Mechanism for Drone Perching and Recharging
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Date
2023-08-04
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Abstract
The energy density limitations of current battery technologies constrain reconnaissance missions carried out by small unmanned aerial systems (UAS). Even in dangerous environments, limited range requires many UAS to return to base for charging. Such flight profiles can compromise the mission and/or waste valuable resources. This work supports a proposed method to mitigate such constraints by focusing on the development of bi-stable active perching mechanisms that enable UAS recharging via surrounding infrastructure (e.g., power lines), allowing for extended mission range. The proposed bi-stabilty allows UAS to perch without requiring critical electrical energy, avoid reliance on reserve power from depleted batteries by storing and then rapidly recovering elastic strain energy. For repeated perching, gripping mechanisms must include some manner of opening/reset mechanism. Previous and current designs typically use servo motors to reset, which have low energy-to-volume ratios and short life span. To increase energy-to-volume ratio and reliability of the reset mechanism, this work will implement active material actuators to reset the bi-stable perching mechanism.
This research effort addressed homogenization and parameterization across disparate bi-stable gripping mechanism concepts followed by a design of experiment (DOE) study via Latin Hyper-cube sampling. From the DOE, a design was selected and optimized using an efficient global optimization algorithm to find the optimal solution for low drag and high force bi-stable perching.
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Gripper, Optimization