Multimodal aerial-tethered robot AVOCADO published in IEEE T-RO!

Spiders can move vertically with their dragline silk, but did you know they can also fly with the wind? At the Environmental Robotics Lab, we took this as an inspiration to develop AVOCADO, a robot that uses a tether and propellers to explore cluttered tree canopies. Our initial work was presented at IROS 2022 as a finalist for Best Paper Award in AgroRobotics.

Since then, we have continued our development on the platform and formalized a 3D dynamic model and simulation to better study and understand the limitations of our system, as well as to develop controllers in simulation before transfer to the real robot.

We are happy to announce that the two year long research project has been published as an evolved paper in IEEE T-​RO. We thank our former master student Florian Wenk for laying the foundation for the modelling, simulation, and control framework.

By combining different means of locomotion, we believe that robots will soon be able to acquire vital data for nature conservation and restoration from within forests and their canopies.

• Youtube Video
• Accepted paper (direct access)
• IEEE T-​RO version
• IROS 2022 Conference Paper