Drones are often equipped with shock-absorbing rigid structures intended for landing or absorbing impact of crashes. While the landing gear that manufacturers supply does protect the drone from damage, these rigid structures work best on flat surfaces. We investigate the use of compliant structures inspired by origami for landing gear and bumper systems for drones. Compliant structures absorb more energy than rigid structures and are adaptable to varied terrain. Two of our main goals were to make the designs easy to manufacture/reproduce, and to reduce the weight of the prototypes to minimally affect drone flight performance. The majority of our designs are targeted towards the landing system of the drone. In our investigation, we explore variations of origami folds and how these variations affect damage from compressive impact.

The nature of this research is to prototype different types of perching landing gears for drones. Using natural mechanisms found in animals, our team created two bio-inspired designs of perching landing gears for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV’s). These designs were able to demonstrate the feasibility of landing-gear systems that enable bird-sized UAV’s to perch and take-off from branch-like structures.