An indoor flying platform with collision robustness and self-recovery

This paper presents a new paradigm in the design of indoor flying robots that replaces collision avoidance with collision robustness. Indoor flying robots must operate within constrained and cluttered environments where even nature´s most sophisticated flyers such as insects cannot avoid all obstacles and should thus be able to withstand collisions and recover from them autonomously. A prototype platform specifically designed to withstand collisions and recover without human intervention is presented. Its dimensions are optimized to fulfill the varying constraints of aerodynamics, robustness and self-recovery, and new construction techniques focusing on shock absorption are presented. Finally, the platform is tested both in-flight and during collisions to characterize its collision robustness and self-recovery capability.