  Current aerial robots demonstrate limited interaction capabilities in
unstructured environments when compared with their biological counterparts.
Some examples include their inability to tolerate collisions and to
successfully land or perch on objects of unknown shapes, sizes, and texture.
Efforts to include compliance have introduced designs that incorporate external
mechanical impact protection at the cost of reduced agility and flight time due
to the added weight. In this work, we propose and develop a light-weight,
inflatable, soft-bodied aerial robot (SoBAR) that can pneumatically vary its
body stiffness to achieve intrinsic collision resilience. Unlike the
conventional rigid aerial robots, SoBAR successfully demonstrates its ability
to repeatedly endure and recover from collisions in various directions, not
only limited to in-plane ones. Furthermore, we exploit its capabilities to
demonstrate perching where the 3D collision resilience helps in improving the
perching success rates. We also augment SoBAR with a novel hybrid fabric-based,
bistable (HFB) grasper that can utilize impact energies to perform
contact-reactive grasping through rapid shape conforming abilities. We
exhaustively study and offer insights into the collision resilience, impact
absorption, and manipulation capabilities of SoBAR with the HFB grasper.
Finally, we compare the performance of conventional aerial robots with the
SoBAR through collision characterizations, grasping identifications, and
experimental validations of collision resilience and perching in various
scenarios and on differently shaped objects.
