ROBBRIEF
Université de Sherbrooke's Ice Dart hit 100% perching success in 30 km/h wind on slopes up to 58° at Iceland's Fjallsjökull glacier by digging tiny hooks into the ice.
A small quadcopter from Université de Sherbrooke has stayed put on Arctic ice in 100% of field tests, even in 30 km/h wind on slopes up to 58°. The Ice Dart, tested on the Fjallsjökull glacier in southeast Iceland, was built to perch after touchdown rather than land and take off again. It hit perching at approach speeds as high as 3 m/s, per a paper in IEEE Transactions on Field Robotics.
Each leg ends in microspines, small hook-like teeth that bite into the ice on impact. A dissipative landing gear absorbs the hit, and reverse thrust slows the approach. The setup extends prior perching work for trucks, boats, and roofs. On contact, the spines dig in and the drone stays.
Why perch at all? Alexis Lussier Desbiens, the engineering professor who co-authored the paper, calls it a power and signature problem. "Landing drops energy consumption dramatically," he told IEEE Spectrum, and a perched drone can shut down its motors entirely. The result is near-silence, no rotor downwash, and a smaller radio and heat footprint, the kind of low profile a flyover cannot match. For monitoring that needs to last days, not minutes, perching turns a battery-limited flight into a fixed observation post.
For now, the result is a demonstrated mechanism. The team says a perched drone could "simplify iceberg tracking" in a warming Arctic, but no independent validation of operational impact is in the public record.