{"id":415,"date":"2026-04-01T07:48:28","date_gmt":"2026-04-01T14:48:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/sciencechina\/?p=415"},"modified":"2026-04-01T07:48:43","modified_gmt":"2026-04-01T14:48:43","slug":"the-bat-inspired-gripper-that-lets-drones-perch-like-birds-and-switch-off-their-motors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/sciencechina\/2026\/04\/01\/the-bat-inspired-gripper-that-lets-drones-perch-like-birds-and-switch-off-their-motors\/","title":{"rendered":"Bat-Inspired Gripper Lets Drones Perch Like Birds and Switch Off Their Motors"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>A bat hanging from a cave ceiling is doing something that looks effortless but is, mechanically speaking, genuinely strange. It isn&#8217;t gripping. Not actively, anyway. When a bat lands inverted, its body weight pulls down on tendons running through the legs, and those tendons tighten the toes around whatever surface the animal has landed on. No muscle contraction required, no energy expenditure beyond the initial grab. The bat can sleep for hours, or days, its hold only strengthening under its own weight. The moment it lets go, it falls into flight. It&#8217;s a passive lock that costs nothing to maintain and almost nothing to trigger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Drones don&#8217;t work like that. A multirotor UAV holding position in the air is burning through its battery continuously, motors spinning hard against gravity even when it has nowhere to be and nothing to do. For long environmental monitoring missions or disaster response operations, that&#8217;s a fundamental problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Engineers have spent years trying to fix it by giving drones a perch. Attach a gripper to the underside, land on a tree branch or a street lamp, switch off the rotors, and let the structure hold the aircraft instead of the motors. It sounds straightforward. It isn&#8217;t. The hard part isn&#8217;t attaching to the branch. It&#8217;s building a gripper that snaps shut reliably with almost no force on contact, then holds on with enormous force once it&#8217;s closed, and does both of those things without any powered mechanism to bridge the gap between them. That combination has resisted engineering for a long time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A team at Sun Yat-Sen University, led by Lulu Han, think they&#8217;ve found a route in, and it borrows directly from the bat. Their gripper doesn&#8217;t use motors or shape memory alloys or any external actuation to hold its grip. It uses magnets, cables, and a structural configuration drawn from an architectural concept called tensegrity, and the result is a device that closes in about 42 milliseconds and then requires roughly 85 times more energy to open than it needed to shut. You push it gently; it locks hard. That&#8217;s the bat&#8217;s trick, more or less, done in steel and neodymium.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div data-wp-context=\"{ &quot;autoclose&quot;: false, &quot;accordionItems&quot;: [] }\" data-wp-interactive=\"core\/accordion\" role=\"group\" class=\"wp-block-accordion is-layout-flow wp-block-accordion-is-layout-flow\">\n<div data-wp-class--is-open=\"state.isOpen\" data-wp-context=\"{ &quot;id&quot;: &quot;accordion-item-1&quot;, &quot;openByDefault&quot;: false }\" data-wp-init=\"callbacks.initAccordionItems\" data-wp-on-window--hashchange=\"callbacks.hashChange\" class=\"wp-block-accordion-item is-layout-flow wp-block-accordion-item-is-layout-flow\">\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-accordion-heading has-base-background-color has-background\"><button aria-expanded=\"false\" aria-controls=\"accordion-item-1-panel\" data-wp-bind--aria-expanded=\"state.isOpen\" data-wp-on--click=\"actions.toggle\" data-wp-on--keydown=\"actions.handleKeyDown\" id=\"accordion-item-1\" type=\"button\" class=\"wp-block-accordion-heading__toggle\"><span class=\"wp-block-accordion-heading__toggle-title\">Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)<\/span><span class=\"wp-block-accordion-heading__toggle-icon\" aria-hidden=\"true\">+<\/span><\/button><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<div inert aria-labelledby=\"accordion-item-1\" data-wp-bind--inert=\"!state.isOpen\" id=\"accordion-item-1-panel\" role=\"region\" class=\"wp-block-accordion-panel has-base-background-color has-background is-layout-flow wp-block-accordion-panel-is-layout-flow\">\n<div class=\"schema-faq wp-block-yoast-faq-block\"><div class=\"schema-faq-section\" id=\"faq-question-1775054821397\"><strong class=\"schema-faq-question\"><strong>Could a drone really perch on a tree branch the way a bird does?<\/strong><\/strong> <p class=\"schema-faq-answer\">In principle, yes, and this research demonstrates it in outdoor conditions. The key difference from a bird is that the drone needs a mechanical gripper rather than clawed feet, and that gripper has to trigger passively on contact without precise positioning. The magnetic tensegrity design achieves this, though it works best within a specific size range of target structures.<\/p> <\/div> <div class=\"schema-faq-section\" id=\"faq-question-1775054834018\"><strong class=\"schema-faq-question\"><strong>Why does hovering drain a drone&#8217;s battery so much faster than just sitting still?<\/strong><\/strong> <p class=\"schema-faq-answer\">Maintaining altitude requires continuous motor thrust against gravity, which draws large amounts of current regardless of whether the aircraft is moving or stationary. In the tests described here, hovering drew roughly 288 watts, while a perched drone with motors off drew less than 7 watts. That roughly 40-fold difference is why perching, even briefly, can meaningfully extend mission duration for monitoring or sensing tasks.<\/p> <\/div> <div class=\"schema-faq-section\" id=\"faq-question-1775054842609\"><strong class=\"schema-faq-question\"><strong>What makes this gripper different from other robotic grippers that have been tried on drones before?<\/strong><\/strong> <p class=\"schema-faq-answer\">Most earlier grippers either require continuous power to stay closed, or use active actuators to modulate their grip force. This design is passive in both directions: it snaps shut on gentle contact using stored magnetic energy, and then holds without any power input at all. The challenge it solves is that earlier bistable (two-state) designs had a fixed energy barrier, so they couldn&#8217;t be both easy to trigger and hard to dislodge at the same time.<\/p> <\/div> <div class=\"schema-faq-section\" id=\"faq-question-1775054858326\"><strong class=\"schema-faq-question\"><strong>Is wind a serious problem for a perched drone?<\/strong><\/strong> <p class=\"schema-faq-answer\">It can be. The researchers tested grip strength under simulated branch oscillation and found that at 2 hertz, the force needed to dislodge the gripper dropped by more than two thirds compared to still conditions. This means the drone&#8217;s weight needs to be matched carefully to expected environmental conditions, and the system works best in relatively calm environments or on rigid structures rather than flexible branches in high wind.<\/p> <\/div> <\/div>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<p>The core mechanism is a bistable structure, which means it has two stable states and an energy barrier between them. In the open state, two finger-like frames held apart by cables and magnetic forces sit ready. When an object nudges the central rope, the equilibrium tips, the magnetic attraction snaps the fingers closed, and the structure drops into its second stable state. The asymmetry is the key thing: getting from open to closed costs only about 0.58 joules, which is why a light touch is enough to trigger it. Getting back from closed to open, against the magnets now pulling hard in the other direction, requires around 49 joules. That enormous difference, a consequence of the nonlinear way magnetic force ramps up as two magnets close in on each other, is what produces such powerful retention from such gentle triggering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Han and her colleagues describe this as resolving a &#8220;long-standing trade-off between sensitive triggering and secure retention&#8221; in bistable grippers, and the numbers back the claim up pretty well. The maximum force needed to trigger the gripper in testing was about 0.15 newtons, roughly the weight of a small strawberry. The force needed to pull an object free once grasped reached 25.38 newtons, around 200 times greater. The team ran the triggering cycle a thousand times and the numbers barely shifted. On rough surfaces the holding force improved by about 30 percent, and the gripper could support payloads ranging from under half a kilogram to just over two.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The main complication with any bistable design is the release problem. If the closed state is that stable, how do you open it again without manual intervention? The team&#8217;s answer is a small inflatable airbag built into the gripper&#8217;s base, which pumps up to 28 kilopascals, pushes the magnets apart, and then deflates passively through a pressure-regulating valve. The whole reset cycle, from closed to ready again, takes roughly 15 seconds for the magnet separation and around 20 seconds for full deflation. Not instant, but enough for repeated operation without a technician having to touch the thing each time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When the gripper was integrated into a small quadrotor UAV the energy difference between hovering and perching turned out to be stark. Hovering drew roughly 288 watts from the battery; perched, the whole system drew around 6.7 watts, almost all of it for sensors and communication rather than flight. The battery voltage barely dropped during extended perching. During hovering it fell steadily. The team&#8217;s conclusion is that perching on a structure and switching off the motors is, by a wide margin, the most effective way to extend mission duration for a lightweight aerial platform, more effective than any amount of propeller or algorithm optimisation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There are real limits here, though, and the paper is reasonably candid about them. Wind matters. When the team simulated branch oscillation at 2 hertz, the failure force dropped by more than two thirds compared to the static baseline. The gripper&#8217;s finger geometry also constrains what it can grab: objects wider than about 25 millimetres don&#8217;t allow full closure, and grasping stability depends on matching the gripper&#8217;s operating range to the target. Magnetic interference with onboard sensors like magnetometers and inertial measurement units is flagged as a problem not yet solved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The application experiments are perhaps the most suggestive part of the paper. The team perched three UAVs at different locations and used them as stationary nodes for an ultra-wideband positioning network, achieving localisation precision on the order of 10 centimetres in tests where GPS was returning errors of several metres. A fourth UAV navigated using this perched infrastructure, and then delivered a small payload to a target location. Each perched aircraft was doing something useful while drawing almost no power to stay there. It&#8217;s a small demonstration of a different way of thinking about what a drone swarm might be: not a fleet of things constantly burning energy to stay airborne, but a mix of mobile and temporarily stationary platforms, saving power by resting on the environment when they can.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Whether all of this scales past the laboratory is the usual open question. The finger geometry needs further optimisation, electromagnetic shielding for the onboard sensors needs to be worked out, and the airbag reset mechanism adds a pneumatic system to what is otherwise a passive device. Each of those complications has a weight and a power cost. But the underlying physics, a magnetic bistable structure that copies the energetic logic of a bat&#8217;s passive grip, has now been demonstrated working on an actual aircraft in outdoor conditions on actual tree branches. That part, at least, is no longer theoretical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The bats, presumably, are unimpressed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p>DOI \/ Source: <a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.34133\/cbsystems.0535\">https:\/\/doi.org\/10.34133\/cbsystems.0535<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A bat hanging from a cave ceiling is doing something that looks effortless but is, mechanically speaking, genuinely strange. It isn&#8217;t gripping. Not actively, anyway. When a bat lands inverted, its body weight pulls down on tendons running through the legs, and those tendons tighten the toes around whatever surface the animal has landed on. &#8230; <a title=\"Bat-Inspired Gripper Lets Drones Perch Like Birds and Switch Off Their Motors\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/sciencechina\/2026\/04\/01\/the-bat-inspired-gripper-that-lets-drones-perch-like-birds-and-switch-off-their-motors\/\" aria-label=\"Read more about Bat-Inspired Gripper Lets Drones Perch Like Birds and Switch Off Their Motors\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1299,"featured_media":416,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[7,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life-nonhumans","category-technology","generate-columns","tablet-grid-50","mobile-grid-100","grid-parent","grid-50"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v27.4 (Yoast SEO v27.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Bat-Inspired Gripper Lets Drones Perch Like Birds and Switch Off Their Motors - SciChi<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/sciencechina\/2026\/04\/01\/the-bat-inspired-gripper-that-lets-drones-perch-like-birds-and-switch-off-their-motors\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Bat-Inspired Gripper Lets Drones Perch Like Birds and Switch Off Their Motors\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A bat hanging from a cave ceiling is doing something that looks effortless but is, mechanically speaking, genuinely strange. It isn&#8217;t gripping. Not actively, anyway. When a bat lands inverted, its body weight pulls down on tendons running through the legs, and those tendons tighten the toes around whatever surface the animal has landed on. ... Read more\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/sciencechina\/2026\/04\/01\/the-bat-inspired-gripper-that-lets-drones-perch-like-birds-and-switch-off-their-motors\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"SciChi\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-04-01T14:48:28+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2026-04-01T14:48:43+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/sciencechina\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/16\/2026\/04\/drone-with-talons.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"700\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"649\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"SciChi\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"SciChi\" \/>\n\t<meta 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a drone really perch on a tree branch the way a bird does?\",\"answerCount\":1,\"acceptedAnswer\":{\"@type\":\"Answer\",\"text\":\"In principle, yes, and this research demonstrates it in outdoor conditions. The key difference from a bird is that the drone needs a mechanical gripper rather than clawed feet, and that gripper has to trigger passively on contact without precise positioning. The magnetic tensegrity design achieves this, though it works best within a specific size range of target structures.\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Question\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/scienceblog.com\\\/sciencechina\\\/2026\\\/04\\\/01\\\/the-bat-inspired-gripper-that-lets-drones-perch-like-birds-and-switch-off-their-motors\\\/#faq-question-1775054834018\",\"position\":2,\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/scienceblog.com\\\/sciencechina\\\/2026\\\/04\\\/01\\\/the-bat-inspired-gripper-that-lets-drones-perch-like-birds-and-switch-off-their-motors\\\/#faq-question-1775054834018\",\"name\":\"Why does hovering drain a drone's battery so much faster than just sitting still?\",\"answerCount\":1,\"acceptedAnswer\":{\"@type\":\"Answer\",\"text\":\"Maintaining altitude requires continuous motor thrust against gravity, which draws large amounts of current regardless of whether the aircraft is moving or stationary. In the tests described here, hovering drew roughly 288 watts, while a perched drone with motors off drew less than 7 watts. 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The key difference from a bird is that the drone needs a mechanical gripper rather than clawed feet, and that gripper has to trigger passively on contact without precise positioning. The magnetic tensegrity design achieves this, though it works best within a specific size range of target structures.","inLanguage":"en-US"},"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Question","@id":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/sciencechina\/2026\/04\/01\/the-bat-inspired-gripper-that-lets-drones-perch-like-birds-and-switch-off-their-motors\/#faq-question-1775054834018","position":2,"url":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/sciencechina\/2026\/04\/01\/the-bat-inspired-gripper-that-lets-drones-perch-like-birds-and-switch-off-their-motors\/#faq-question-1775054834018","name":"Why does hovering drain a drone's battery so much faster than just sitting still?","answerCount":1,"acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"Maintaining altitude requires continuous motor thrust against gravity, which draws large amounts of current regardless of whether the aircraft is moving or stationary. In the tests described here, hovering drew roughly 288 watts, while a perched drone with motors off drew less than 7 watts. 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