Tactile-Based Exploration, Mapping, and Navigation With Collision-Resilient Aerial Vehicles

This article introduces XPLORER, a passive deformable aerial vehicle with a spring-augmented chassis and proprioceptive state awareness, designed to endure collisions and maintain smooth contact with the environment. A fast-converging external force estimation algorithm for XPLORER is designed to leverage onboard sensors and proprioceptive data for contact detection. Using this force information, four motion primitives are proposed, including three novel tactile-based primitives—tactile-traversal, tactile-turning, and ricocheting—to aid XPLORER in navigating unknown environments. These primitives are synthesized autonomously in real time to enable efficient exploration and navigation by leveraging collisions and contacts. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, highlighting the potential of passive deformable aerial vehicles for contact-rich real-world tasks, such as nondestructive inspection, surveillance and mapping, even pursuit/evasion.