Morphing aerial robot adapts shape and boosts lifting power
A Morphing Aerial Robot With Thruster-Integrated Flexible Continuum Links for Shape Adaptive Aerial Manipulation
Robotics
Summary
Flying robots that manipulate objects often struggle between being flexible and strong. The authors created a flying robot with bendable arms that can change shape to fit around objects while also having small thrusters along its arms to push harder. This design helps the robot hold and move things better while flying. They also made special structures and controls to keep the arms steady and reduce shaking during flight.
What this means in practice
- •For drone delivery teams: Handle bulky or irregular packages more effectively by adapting the drone’s manipulators to the package shape while maintaining stable flight.
- •For search and rescue operators: Use shape-adaptive flying robots to grasp and move debris or rescue supplies in tight or irregular environments.
Authors
Eri Sawada, Kazuki Sugihara, Ayano Miyamichi, Kunio Kojima, Kei Okada
Abstract
In recent years, aerial manipulation has attracted increasing attention as a key to expand the application of aerial robots. In this work, we focus on two major research directions for achieving versatile aerial manipulation: (i) acquiring high environmental adaptability using soft manipulators, and (ii) expanding the feasible wrench space by distributing thrusters along the manipulator. However, no aerial robot has simultaneously satisfied these two requirements. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a morphing rotor-distributed aerial robot with flexible continuum links that achieves both high shape adaptability and an expanded wrench space. The flexible continuum links function as soft manipulators, passively conforming to the shape of the environment, while the thrusters distributed along the continuum links expand the feasible thrust wrench space and enable the end-effector to exert large interaction forces. To realize the proposed robot, it is essential to suppress vibrations of the lightweight continuum links. Thus, we develop a composite leaf-spring structure that provides both high torsional and vertical stiffness, and vibration-suppressing control methods. Using these implementations, we demonstrate stable flight and a variety of aerial manipulation tasks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to realize aerial manipulations using flexible links with an integrated thruster.