TU Delft tactile drone technology development

Researchers at TU Delft have developed tactile sensing technologies for drones to improve navigation and stability in environments where visual perception is limited.

Initial developments focused on a bird-inspired drone utilizing a three-fingered robotic gripper with soft tactile sensors. This system allows a drone to detect the position, orientation, and size of a landing surface through physical contact, enabling it to perch on branches or objects to conserve battery.

Subsequent research introduced bio-inspired artificial whiskers, modeled after the vibrissae of rats and mice, for sub-50-gram drones. These flexible whiskers use miniature barometric sensors to detect pressure changes when contact is made, allowing drones to navigate through darkness, smoke, or dust by sensing the position and depth of surfaces in three dimensions.

Recent advancements, published in Nature Communications, have refined this whisker-based system using two 200mm Nitinol whiskers equipped with miniature barometric pressure sensors at their base. This hardware allows drones weighing less than 100 grams to estimate their position and depth in three dimensions with a mean error of approximately 9.18 millimeters.

The sensing and navigation pipeline remains highly efficient, running entirely onboard a microcontroller using only 34 KB of memory. This enables drones to follow contours, avoid obstacles, and build tactile maps of enclosed spaces in visually ambiguous or low-power environments, offering significant potential for search and rescue operations in hazardous locations such as collapsed buildings or underground tunnels.