{"id":3300,"date":"2026-09-23T00:02:04","date_gmt":"2026-09-22T14:02:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/?p=3300"},"modified":"2026-09-23T00:02:04","modified_gmt":"2026-09-22T14:02:04","slug":"how-to-build-bio-inspired-whiskers-enable-tiny-drones-to-navigate-in-darkness-using-touch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/?p=3300","title":{"rendered":"How to build bio-inspired whiskers enable tiny drones to navigate in darkness using touch?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Chaoxiang Ye, Guido de Croon &amp; Salua Hamaza. <a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1038\/s41467-026-77366-7\"><strong>Whisker-based tactile flight for tiny drones<\/strong><\/a>. <i>Nat Commun<\/i><b>17<\/b>, 9743 (2026). https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1038\/s41467-026-77366-7<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">&#8220;<strong><span style=\"color: #ff0000;\">Tiny flying robots hold great potential for search-and-rescue, safety inspections, and environmental monitoring, but their small size and limited computational resources constrain onboard sensing capabilities<\/span><\/strong>. Inspired by animals such as rats and moles which rely on lightweight whiskers to navigate and perceive their surroundings through touch, <span style=\"color: #ff0000;\"><strong>we present a 3.2-gram whisker-based tactile sensing apparatus that enables tiny drones to perceive and interact with their environment through gentle physical contact, even in complete darkness<\/strong><\/span>. The apparatus employs barometers at the base of each whisker to estimate contact depth in flight, enabling obstacle localization while minimizing contact-induced destabilization. To compensate for sensor noise and drift during sustained contact, we develop a tactile depth estimation pipeline that achieves millimeter-scale depth estimation accuracy. Together, <strong><span style=\"color: #ff0000;\">these innovations enable tiny drones to autonomously avoid obstacles, contour surfaces, and explore confined spaces, guided by onboard tactile sensing across both rigid and soft environments<\/span><\/strong>. Running entirely onboard a microcontroller with just 192 KB of memory, our system demonstrates autonomous tactile flight across various scenarios. <span style=\"color: #ff0000;\"><strong>This bio-inspired approach extends perception for mobile robots beyond vision, opening new possibilities for autonomous operations in visually degraded and GPS-denied environments<\/strong><\/span>.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Chaoxiang Ye, Guido de Croon &amp; Salua Hamaza. <a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1038\/s41467-026-77366-7\"><strong>Whisker-based tactile flight for tiny drones<\/strong><\/a>. <i>Nat Commun<\/i><b>17<\/b>, 9743 (2026). https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1038\/s41467-026-77366-7<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Chaoxiang Ye, Guido de Croon &amp; Salua Hamaza. Whisker-based tactile flight for tiny drones. Nat Commun17, 9743 (2026). https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1038\/s41467-026-77366-7 &#8220;Tiny flying robots hold great potential for search-and-rescue, safety inspections, and environmental monitoring, but their small size and limited computational resources constrain onboard sensing capabilities. Inspired by animals such as rats and moles which rely on [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[126,114,420,468],"tags":[711,1520,1521,1519],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3300"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3300"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3300\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3301,"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3300\/revisions\/3301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}