Aerial Deployment of Novel Gravity-Assisted Ground Penetrating Sensors using Nature-Inspired Platform

This paper explores an aerial deployment of sensors which are intended to penetrate into the ground upon impact, enabling data collection of ground properties such as soil moisture, temperature and salinity. This is made possible by the use of diving Samara Autorotating Wing (dSAW), explored in our previous work, which uses a single actuator to perform both a guided autorotation and diving towards the ground at terminal velocity. The versatile maneuvers of dSAW allows a special deployment method whereby the platform can navigate and glide towards intended location and perform a ground insertion of a sensor using its dive. In this work, the feasibility of such deployment is tested using an indoor test rig which accelerates sensors towards a test soil. The prototypes carrying sensors are dropped at a maximum of 15ms ⁻¹ into three different soil types and different levels of moisture and its moment of impact is captured by a high-speed camera at 5,000fps. The sensor selected is shown to survive all drop scenarios, hence demonstrating the feasibility of aerially deployed ground penetrating sensors.