Biologically inspired vision based aerial robot perching*

Limited flight time has constrained the application of the aerial robot. One possible solution is to learn from biological flyers (i.e. birds, flies) to perch on the desired objects. During perching, the aerial robots can still do surveillance related tasks with the desired height and orientation instead of hovering. Research results have shown that visual information named time-to-contact is used for biological flyers perching guidance. And this information can be extracted from consecutive images. It is widely used for robot motion control for autonomous braking and landing since it can realize zero contact velocity. However, for aerial robot perching, a non-zero contact velocity is usually required to make the perching mechanism functionalize. In this research, we propose an optimized two-stage time-to-contact based guidance law. With a properly designed time-to-contact controller, we finally realize the fastest perching with desired contact velocity. The research presented in this paper can be readily applied to the control of the aerial robot for perching with visual feedback, and can inspire more alternative forms of time-to-contact based planning and control for robotic applications.