Microspines Make It Easy for Drones to Perch on Walls and Ceilings

Morgan Pope is a PhD student investigating robots that live at the boundary of airborne and surface locomotion at Stanford's Biomimetics and Dexterous Manipulation Lab. He wrote about SCAMP, a flying and perching robot, for Automaton earlier this year. These places have something in common: we have a need to understand what's going on where established infrastructure can't give us good data. Advances in computation, fabrication, and materials over the last half-century have resulted in small, cheap, and lightweight sensors that can provide us with these data; now the task is to find ways to deploy such sensors rapidly and effectively. One way to do this is with small, agile aerial vehicles like quadrotors.