Drone Folds for Tight Spaces and Optimized Flight

Consider how birds fly, adjusting their wings into many different configurations depending on flight characteristics, and even retracting them as needed to avoid obstacles. Drones, while marvels of our modern world, are for the most part restricted to a static “X” configuration, not able to optimize motor pod positions for the situation.

Researchers at the Robotics and Perception Group at the University of Zurich and the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at EPFL were inspired by birds’ folding ability to build a drone that can maneuver in a similar way.

Using a series of four servo motors controlled by an Arduino Nano, motor pods on a nominally X-shaped drone can be folded into several different configurations to traverse small openings. A powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon flight board with a quad-core processor and 2GB of RAM provides the computing power needed to maintain steady flight characteristics.

Rescue operations where a drone could search through previously inaccessible areas would be the most obvious use for this type of control, but since orientation can be changed on the fly, motors can also be arranged for optimal flight. Work on this concept is ongoing, and the team hopes to build on this design to allow it to bend in all three dimensions for even greater morphology options.