A Morphing-Designed Hexarotor Prototype combining Practical Resilience and Efficiency
Robotics
Summary
The authors built a flying robot called Opti-Hexa that can still fly well even if one propeller breaks, and it uses about the same amount of energy as a regular drone of similar size and parts. They tested different designs by changing the angles between the propellers to find a shape that stays stable and efficient. Using experiments and models, they showed there is a special range of shapes where the drone handles failures without wasting extra energy. They also shared all the hardware and software so others can keep improving these designs.
Authors
Murat Bronz, Mahmoud Hamandi, Elgiz Baskaya, Chiara Gabellieri, Antonio Franchi
Abstract
This work demonstrates experimentally the existence of a hexarotor prototype, termed Opti-Hexa, that simultaneously achieves practical resilience to single-propeller failures and energy efficiency comparable to a standard Star-shaped prototype with the same size, weight, hardware and software. Leveraging a novel open-source morphing platform, we investigate the trade-offs across a continuous range of geometries by varying the angles between adjacent propellers. We study practical efficiency through a data-fitted empirical power model and evaluate practical resilience by comparing the position accuracy and rotational kinetic energy during failure to those observed under nominal hovering conditions. Our experiments confirm the existence of a geometric viability region for this specific morphing platform, where resilience is ensured without the aerodynamic efficiency losses typically associated with practically resilient designs found in the state of the art. The complete hardware and software of the morphing platform are released to support further research.