Sometimes I do love my hoddy as it really allow me to browse something incredibly cool that’s there already without me knowing at all. Like the tech borrowed from insects that possibly allow to grab anything reliably (and even land drones onto the ceiling).
The more I fly my drones, the more fleshed out the idea of the next upgrades are to make them even more useful for my personal research goals.
Recent flights have proven that sometimes all I need is get the drone to a certain height and leave there hanging until the batteries are drained performing an actual task – i.e. serving as a IR/visible light projector or a wi-fi scanner/retranslator. Even though it worked for my applications, 15-20 minutes of hovering allowed by my batteries (and these ARE expensive, if you ask me) do limit the capabilities of the system.
In the majority of cases there was some object nearby that I could have possibly mounted by drone to if there was something that my drone could use to attach itself to the vertical surface.
Turns out (as usual) that this idea has been around for a while now; I all started with the Caltech/NASA research on low gravity drilling (I’d love to know H.Wolowitz has been involved, lol) and the actual drone implementation or microspines landing gear on a drone has been developed by the Stanford’s SCAMP project ( that one can adjust its position on the wall) and the Sherbrooke’s Multimodal Autonomous Drone (S-MAD) fixed wing drone. Here’s a video of the thing in action:
Technically this is already something close to the actual idea I had in mind (even though I have little to no experience with the plane controller programming, this might look even better than the copter-type carrier due to the more gentle nature of landing on the wall).
As of now, there is maker-accessible information on making the actual microspines themselves, however initial tests with the 2×2 clusters of sprung 0.7 mm needles with the 0.2mm point actually already provide optimistic results. Not really something you see in the videos, but still something looking like a cool weekend project for winter.