Toward Aerial Physical Locomotion: The Contact-Fly-Contact Problem

In this letter, we consider the problem of letting an aerial robot exploiting its contact with the environment in order to enhance its motion possibilities, in a way reminiscent of legged robots exploiting contact forces for locomotion purposes. As a representative and initial case study, we consider a quadrotor equipped with a 1-degree of freedom (DOF) arm able to hook at some pivot points, and n...