Design, Optimisation, and Development of Soft Robotic Grippers for Aerial Grasping

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, hold promising potential for rapid logistics across difficult terrains. While delivery drones are set to be part of our everyday lives, these drones face several challenges in trying to pick up a diverse set of objects. This work investigates grasping solutions that allow drones to simply fly by and pick any loose objects up from the ground. The approach leverages the flexibility of soft materials and model-free optimization methods to develop grippers that are robust to positional errors, introduces minimal disturbance to drone flight, and can grasp a wide variety of objects.