Influence of the ground, ceiling, and sidewall on micro-quadrotors
Because of their small size and agility, quadrotors could revolutionize search-and-rescue or terrain-mapping missions. However, to do so, they have to operate in confined spaces such as rubble corridors or glacial crevasses. Existing models for how quadrotors behave near obstacles are based on helicopter theories, which are inaccurate at the smaller scales of quadrotors. We therefore built a flow-mapping arena to study how micro-scale quadrotors interact with nearby boundaries. We discovered, for example, that dueling vortices appear beneath micro-quadrotors as they land at an angle.