Fast and complex aerial maneuvers – no problem for TeraRanger One!

“TeraRanger One is the ideal solution for us” says Alexis Lussier Desbiens, Professor of Robotics and Mechanical Engineering at Sherbrooke University, whose team has developed a fixed-wing flying robot that lands on vertical walls! The S-MAD

(Sherbrooke’s Multimodal Autonomous Drone) uses a thrust-assisted landing technique to reliably land on vertical walls, and then take-off again. To achieve this, they mounted a TeraRanger One distance sensor on the airframe to quickly identify vertical surfaces before pitching S-MAD into a vertical plane for approaching and‘perching’ on the wall. Alexis continues: “Thanks to the sensor’s small and lightweight design – we could easily integrate it on the S-MAD, while the fast update rate gave us the confidence to repeatedly launch the drone at concrete walls!”. Tredecile’s optical LED Time-of-Flight technology for range sensing provides data refresh rates as high as 1000 readings per second, performing as well as, and often better, than laser systems but in a far smaller, lighter (only 8g) and less expensive form-factor.

For this type of creative aerial technology, there are many potential applications, including indoor and outdoor inspections of difficult-to-access locations, or long duration surveillance.
The team from Sherbrooke has provided us with a great video demonstrating both S-MAD and TeraRanger One in action:

You can read more about the project on IEEE Spectrum. It’s a good article, even if they did refer to our technology as ‘laser’ rather than LED!

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