Shape Shifting Drone Can Morph to Fit Through Small Openings
(Image: UZH)
Inspecting a damaged building after an earthquake or during a fire is exactly the kind of job that human rescuers would like drones to do for them. A flying robot could look for people trapped inside and guide the rescue team towards them. But the drone would often have to enter the building through a crack in a wall, a partially open window, or through bars – something the typical size of a drone does not allow.
To solve this problem, researchers from the Robotics and Perception Group at the University of Zurich and the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at EPFL created a new kind of drone. Both groups are part of the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Robotics funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Inspired by birds that fold their wings in mid-air to cross narrow passages, the new drone can squeeze itself to pass through gaps and then go back to its previous shape, all the while continuing to fly. And it can even hold and transport objects along the way.
Mobile arms can fold around the main frame
When faced with a narrow passage, the drone can switch to a “H” shape, with all arms lined up along one axis.
The Zurich and Lausanne teams worked in collaboration and designed a quadrotor with four propellers that rotate independently, mounted on mobile arms that can fold around the main frame thanks to servo-motors. The ace in the hole is a control system that adapts in real time to any new position of the arms, adjusting the thrust of the propellers as the center of gravity shifts.
Credit: ailabRPG
A “T” shape can be used to bring the onboard camera mounted on the central frame as close as possible to objects that the drone needs to inspect.
In the future, the researchers hope to further improve the drone structure so that it can fold in all three dimensions. Most importantly, they want to develop algorithms that will make the drone truly autonomous, allowing it to look for passages in a real disaster scenario and automatically choose the best way to pass through them. “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,” says Falanga.
The standard configuration is X-shaped, with the four arms stretched out and the propellers at the widest possible distance from each other.
Image: UZH
Contacts and sources:
Prof. Dr. Davide Scaramuzza
Citation: The Foldable Drone: A Morphing Quadrotor that can Squeeze and Fly
Davide Falanga, Kevin Kleber, Stefano Mintchev, Dario Floreano, Davide Scaramuzza. . IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2018; 1 DOI: 10.1109/LRA.2018.2885575
Free copy: http://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch/docs/RAL18_Falanga.pdf
Source: http://www.ineffableisland.com/2018/12/shape-shifting-drone-can-morph-to-fit.html
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