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This flying robot needs a hug
A crash landing that’s considered a complete success.
Instead of hunting for a runway, researchers have built an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that can land by crashing into trees or poles and wrapping its grippy wings around them to prevent a fall. The UAV, which its designers from the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) have called the PercHug, is yet another robot built to emulate a behavior seen in nature: bats and owls using their wings to both fly and climb or perch onto trees. As explained in a recently published paper in the journal Nature, the lightweight 550g UAV features an “upturned nose design” that causes the craft to reorient itself vertically when it begins to fall after a crash.
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