DARPA’s Helicopter Landing Gear Would Help Pilots Land On Mountains, Choppy

The legs are articulated much like a dragonfly’s legs are, and they allow the drone chopper DARPA equipped with them to pull off some feats that – if even possible with a standard helicopter – are at least incredibly hard and highly risky.

Insects’ abilities to land on uneven surfaces have long fascinated designers in the aviation community, since ideal landings aren’t always possible – especially in the cases of disaster relief and military operations.

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is looking into adaptive landing gear that would enable helicopters to land and launch on angled, irregular and moving surfaces.

The issue at hand is, essentially, you can’t land a helicopter on anything other than a perfectly flat surface.

Even better, it will allow helicopters to land in rougher weather and reduce the overall stress on the airframe, which is a good thing when you have a vehicle whose main method of floating has a part called the Jesus bolt.

The gear developed under the program was demonstrated recently near Atlanta.

“The equipment – mounted on an otherwise unmodified, unmanned helicopter – successfully demonstrated the ability to land and take off from terrain that would be impossible to operate from with standard landing gear”, Ashish Bagai, DARPA program manager, said in a statement.

The idea behind the Robotic Landing Gear is fairly simple: the standard helicopter skids, or fixed wheel landing gear, are to be replaced by an adaptive system via the use of automatically articulating landing legs. But as the technology fundamentally works in the same way, there’s no reason to believe this won’t make its way onto full-sized helicopters in the future. As each leg extends on landing, DARPA said, its sensor “determines in real time the appropriate angle to assume” to keep the helicopter level and minimize the risk of rotor contact with the surface.

The adaptive landing gear is not as outright terrifying as some of the other DARPA-affiliated robotics work – like Boston Dynamics’ Atlas humanoid running in the woods, presumably in preparation for murdering some human.