Swan-Inspired Unmanned Aerial Vehicles With Long-neck Visual Perception System

Abstract

Bio-inspired robots have attracting increasing attention in robotics. The paper proposes a novel swan-inspired unmanned aerial vehicle to realize flexible environmental perception. The developed UAV is inspired from the biological structure of a swan, and it is composed of a quadrotor and a long-neck visual perception system. The perception system is designed with a camera-IMU sensor equipped at the end of a 3-DoF serial manipulator, and the system is mounted at the bottom of the UAV body. The algorithms of state estimation and motion control for UAV's autonomous flight in complex environments are also developed. Finally, experiments are performed on the developed UAV prototype to verify the localization and trajectory tracking performances.