Ice Dart prototype lands on 60-degree ice walls

On Iceland’s Fjallsjökull glacier, a small quadcopter came down onto slopes that normally offer a drone nowhere to stand. The 2.65-kg Ice Dart, built by researchers at the Université de Sherbrooke, completed 24 clean landings on ice as steep as 58 degrees, even with winds gusting past 30 km/h. The team’s paper in IEEE Transactions on Field Robotics describes it as the first drone able to perch on ice that steep and hold its position.

The grip comes from four carbon-fiber legs arranged in an X pattern. Each foot carries two spring-loaded spines pointing in opposite directions, so one can bite into the ice whether the drone lands facing uphill or downhill. Inspired by a cat’s retractable claws, the spines engage passively rather than requiring a pilot to calculate the exact approach angle. Thirty-eight friction disks absorb the landing shock, keeping the legs compressed against the ice; for a fraction of a second, the motors also reverse thrust to push the aircraft into the wall.

In controlled laboratory tests, the Ice Dart held on slopes up to 60 degrees at landing speeds of 3 m/s. That matters because standard rubber-footed drones begin losing grip on slopes as gentle as 9 degrees, while gravity presses a drone less firmly against a steep wall. The Sherbrooke design replaces that fading grip with a mechanical bite.

And then what, concretely? A hovering drone can exhaust its battery in minutes; a perched drone could remain as a fixed sensor for hours or days, while shutting down major systems to become quieter and reduce its thermal and radio-frequency signature. That could offer researchers and maritime operators another way to watch icebergs and support environmental studies, alongside broader Arctic monitoring.

The gap between a successful landing and a working monitoring tool remains clear. The Iceland trials used a human pilot and a second drone for visual inspection, and the Ice Dart has not yet faced a genuinely drifting iceberg in open water. Autonomous landing is the team’s next step, leaving the aircraft at the prototype stage rather than in operational service.