Autonomous and sustained perching of multirotor platforms on smooth surfaces

Due to their high dexterity and maneuverability, multirotors represent a huge potential for the use in surveillance and crowd-monitoring applications. Unfortunately, one of the main issues of this class of UAVs is their high power consumption, which severely limits their operating time. This yields their application in many surveillance applications impractical as these often imply prolonged missions. Prior steps were made to increase the operating time by the design of an aerial manipulator that enables these multirotors to perch onto smooth surfaces, allowing to disable the rotors, thereby circumventing the problem of limited flight time. This method, based on passive vacuum cups, demonstrated to be effective but lacks any form of automation or failure prevention. This work extends the previous work by automating the perching procedure and by implementing methods to prevent failure. Experiments have validated the approach, demonstrating the capability of the system to remain airborne for over 45 minutes, while only running the rotors for less than 3 minutes in that time period.