A Tactile Feedback Approach to Path Recovery after High-Speed Impacts for Collision-Resilient Drones

Abstract

Aerial robots are a well-established solution for exploration, monitoring, and inspection, thanks to their superior maneuverability and agility. However, in many environments, they risk crashing and sustaining damage after collisions. Traditional methods focus on avoiding obstacles entirely, but these approaches can be limiting, particularly in cluttered spaces or on weight-and compute-constrained platforms such as drones. This paper presents a novel approach to enhance drone robustness and autonomy by developing a path recovery and adjustment method for a high-speed collision-resilient aerial robot equipped with lightweight, distributed tactile sensors. The proposed system explicitly models collisions using pre-collision velocities, rates and tactile feedback to predict post-collision dynamics, improving state estimation accuracy. Additionally, we introduce a computationally efficient vector-field-based path representation that guarantees convergence to a user-specified path, while naturally avoiding known obstacles. Post-collision, contact point locations are incorporated into the vector field as a repulsive potential, enabling the drone to avoid obstacles while naturally returning to its path. The effectiveness of this method is validated through Monte Carlo simulations and demonstrated on a physical prototype, showing successful path following, collision recovery, and adjustment at speeds up to 3.7 m/s.