It’s a bird! It’s a drone! Well, um, actually it’s a drone that perches like a bird.
Just as a bat might cling to a wall or a bird perch on a branch to rest, drones can also take an energy-saving break by grasping onto something.
“Perching and resting can provide lower power consumption, better stability, and larger view ranges in many cases,” says Yale University’s Kaiyu Hang, lead author of a paper published in Science Robotics today. He says this strategy would be very useful for so-called perch-and-stare applications, where drones sit up high and make long-term observations …
MIT Technology Review | March 13, 2019
