Reliable Perching Makes Fixed-Wing UAVs Much More Useful

UAV designs are a perpetual compromise between the ability to fly long distances efficiently with payloads (fixed-wing) and the ability to maneuver, hover, and land easily (rotorcraft). With a very few rather bizarre exceptions, any aircraft that try to offer the best of both worlds end up relatively complicated, inefficient, and expensive. The ideal fantasy UAV would be a fixed-wing aircraft with the magical ability to land on a dime, and a group of researchers from the University of Sherbrooke in Canada have come very close to making that happen, with a little airplane that uses legs and claws to reliably perch on walls. The majority of the perching robots that we've seen are quadrotors. Perching with a quadrotor is significantly easier than perching with a fixed-wing aircraft, because you have many more degrees of control, and you're not obligated to keep the vehicle moving forward all the time.