WASHINGTON: Inspired by how birds land and perch on branches, a team of engineers at Stanford University has built robotic graspers that can fit on drones, enabling them to catch objects and grip various surfaces.
The advance could allow flying robots to conserve power in situations where they might otherwise be required to hover — for example in search and rescue missions — or help ecologists collect data more easily in forests.
“We want to be able to land anywhere — that’s what makes it exciting from an engineering and robotics perspective,” David Lentink, who co-authored a paper about the design in Science Robotics released Wednesday, told…
