The Foldable Drone: A Morphing Quadrotor that can Squeeze and Fly
The Foldable Drone: A Morphing Quadrotor that can Squeeze and Fly
(This video is narrated). The recent advances in state estimation, perception, and navigation algorithms have significantly contributed to the ubiquitous use of quadrotors for inspection, mapping, and aerial imaging. To further increase the versatility of quadrotors, recent works investigated the use of an adaptive morphology, which consists of modifying the shape of the vehicle during flight to suit a specific task or environment. However, these works either increase the complexity of the platform or decrease its controllability. In this work, we propose a novel, simpler, yet effective morphing design for quadrotors consisting of a frame with four independently rotating arms that fold around the main frame. To guarantee stable flight at all times, we exploit an optimal control strategy that adapts on the fly to the drone morphology. We demonstrate the versatility of the proposed adaptive morphology in different tasks, such as negotiation of narrow gaps, close inspection of vertical surfaces, and object grasping and transportation. The experiments are performed on an actual, fully autonomous quadrotor relying solely on onboard visual-inertial sensors and compute. No external motion tracking systems and computers are used. This is the first work showing stable flight without requiring any symmetry of the morphology.
Reference:
D. Falanga, K. Kleber, S. Mintchev, D. Floreano, D. Scaramuzza, “The Foldable Drone: A Morphing Quadrotor that can Squeeze and Fly”. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2018.
PDF: http://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch/docs/RAL18_Falanga.pdf
Our research page on vision-based quadrotor navigation:
http://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch/research_mav.html
Affiliations:
D. Falanga, K. Kleber and D. Scaramuzza are with the Robotics and Perception Group, Dep. of Informatics, University of Zurich, and Dep. of Neuroinformatics, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, Switzerland
http://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch/
S. Mintchev and D. Floreano are with the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems, Institute of Microengineering, School of Engineering, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland.
http://lis.epfl.ch
Their paper details the reason why they want the drone to morph instead of always using a smaller sized drone. For longer battery life and different angular velocity it can produce
Why not just use a smaller drone? When has advanced tech ever been used for search and rescue? Let’s be honest, the applications for new tech is always in weaponry.
wow
Really nice to see such and idea. As grapping as item is really looking easy and no additional weight needed for arms
For all those who ask why not just make the drone smaller, yu need to learn about aerodynamic property and aerodynamic interference, inertia and mass contrl. Or just read the academic paper in the description of the video!
Eh? Why not just make a small drone that can go into any holes rather than a bigger one that can morph into a smaller one? Isn’t this unnecessary?
Awesome , greetings from Turkey
Why not just keep the drone in ‘small’ mode and remove the weight of the servos?
Useless shit…..will get shot down in a war zone within seconds while the drone is yawning leisurely 😁. Only good for time pass.
mm, this is the next step. Now make it waterproof and let it dive and swim.
Sold!!!
Great work! It seems that nature helps us to make impressive designs
Great work !!
Very impressive. Way to go, guys!
DJI is watching
Like si vienes de un poco de todo
Mind blowing, excellent
How is flight time affected by the added weight of the additional components ?
Nature is the creator of the artifact
Very cool, is there any advantage to the drone being at any configuration other than it’s smallest? Isn’t your efficientcy largely determined by the disk space of the props and the weight of the vehicle?
Where can I get the frame?!?! And it’s associated Hardware. I’ll take care of all the electronics and everything that makes a kwad fly. And, so long as they’re not proprietary or custom-made servos, I’ll take care of those too. Just tell me where I can buy the frame.
How about.. building an small drone with same equipment and same foldable design..🤔
Interesting morphology and algorithms that may also be used for commercial purposes, such as changing the wing flight characteristics in flight to deal with emergencies such as OEI (one engine inoperative), especially in turboprops, where the loss of an engine produces potential stall of the opposite wing and undesirable pitch, roll and yaw axis changes? Pilots, feel free to chime in on this idea !!!!
0:47 nazi drone
Ok, but why morphing and not having the smallest size all the time?
Amazing stuff
You sand me code
0:48 OH SHIT
When will drones go on sale with this function?
Don’t need that. Just fly FPV.
Foldable drone project is going I need sum help for you how to contact you
Amazing. Making it smaller is interesting, but being able to optimize flight characteristics on the fly really takes things up a level.
I guess in order to make it’s size, the drone should see the size of hole before hand.