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Folding drone flies through small holes

Servo-driven sideways folding hinges allow it to adopt normal, long-thin and compact configurations and, crucially, its real-time control system adjusts rotor thrust to retain controlled stable flight as morphing shifts the center of gravity.

Zurich-EPFL-morph-copter-H“Our solution is quite simple from a mechanical point of view, but it is very versatile and very autonomous, with onboard perception and control systems,” said Zurich researcher Davide Falanga.

The standard configuration is X-shaped, with the four arms stretched out and rotors as far apart as possible. When faced with a narrow passage, it can switch to H-shape, with all arms lined up along one axis or to O-shape, with all arms folded as close to the body as possible.

Zurich-EPFL-morph-copter-TThere is also a T-shape, which brings the on-board camera as close as possible to the periphery of the aircraft for detailed examination of objects.

Future plans include a structure that can fold the drone in three dimensions, and the development of algorithms that will make the drone autonomous, allowing it to seek and select routes through unknown environments.

Zurich-EPFL-morph-copter-normal“The final goal is to give the drone a high-level instruction such as ‘enter that building, inspect every room and come back’ and let it figure out by itself how to do it,” said Falanga.

Zurich-EPFL-morph-copter-flyingTeam members came from the Robotics and Perception Group at Zurich, and also the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).

Both Zurich Group and Lausanne Laboratory are part of the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Robotics funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

The work is described in ‘The foldable drone: A morphing quadrotor that can squeeze and fly‘, published in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letter.

There is a video of it in action.

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