Flying Robot Can Morph in Flight
Credit: © Valentin Rivière and Stéphane Viollet, Étienne Jules Marey Institute of Movement Sciences (CNRS / Aix-Marseille Université).
Deployment of aerial robots in constricted and cluttered areas for search and rescue, exploratory, or mapping operations will become more and more commonplace. They will need to be able to circumnavigate many obstacles and travel through fairly tight passages to complete their missions. Accordingly, researchers from the Étienne Jules Marey Institute of Movement Sciences (CNRS / Aix-Marseille Université) have designed a flying robot that can reduce its wingspan in flight to move through a small opening, without intensive steering that would consume too much energy and require a robotic platform featuring a low-inertia (light and small robot).2
Dubbed Quad-Morphing, the new robot has two rotating arms each equipped with two propellers for helicopter-like flight. A system of elastic and rigid wires allows the robot to change the orientation of its arms in flight so that they are either perpendicular or parallel to its central axis. It adopts the parallel position, halving its wingspan, to traverse a narrow stretch and then switches back to perpendicular position to stabilize its flight, all while flying at a speed of 9 km/h, which is pretty fast for an aerial robot.
At present, it is the precision of the Quad-Morphing autopilot mechanism that determines the robot’s agility. The autopilot activates arm reorientation when the robot nears a tight passage, as determined by a 3D localization system used at the institute.3 The researchers have also equipped the robot with a miniature camera that can take 120 pictures per second. In the future, this will allow Quad-Morphing to independently assess the size of the gap before it and fold its wings accordingly if necessary. Flight testing with the new camera will begin this month.
Contacts and sources:
CNRS / Aix-Marseille Université
Citation: Agile Robotic Fliers: A Morphing-Based Approach.
Valentin Riviere, Augustin Manecy, Stephane Viollet. Soft Robotics, 2018; DOI: 10.1089/soro.2017.0120
Source: http://www.ineffableisland.com/2018/06/flying-robot-can-morph-in-flight.html
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