The team, led by Associate Professor Dr. Salua Hamaza, equipped the drone with two whiskers positioned at an upward angle on the front of the aircraft. Each whisker is connected to three miniature pressure sensors at its base. When the whisker touches a surface, the changes in pressure allow the drone to estimate its relative depth and location, enabling it to avoid obstacles, follow surfaces, and even map its surroundings.
“Here, we aim to equip drones with rich tactile sensing — not for manipulation in the air, but for a novel concept of tactile navigation: using touch to explore and fly through the unknown,” Dr. Hamaza told TechXplore. “But this comes with a challenge: for tactile sensing to work on drones, it needs to be lightweight, low-latency, and low-power. Inspired by nature, we found the answer in whiskers.”
The researchers also addressed the problem of airflow potentially interfering with the tactile readings. They developed a real-time processing pipeline that accounts for minute changes caused by turbulence, giving the whiskers millimetric precision. Remarkably, the entire software stack uses only 34 kilobytes of memory.
“We wanted to show that touch does not have to come at the cost of size or computational power,” researcher Chaoxiang Ye told TechXplore. “Our entire tactile perception pipeline runs onboard using just 34 kilobytes of memory, allowing a tiny drone to sense and respond to its environment in real time.”
While the system is not suitable for high-speed drones, it offers promise for search-and-rescue operations. Rescue units could deploy these tiny drones to explore collapsed structures without endangering personnel or animals, the researchers suggest.