Transforming Aerial Robot DRAGON Gets an Upgrade, Learns to Grab Objects and Twist Valves
While the original DRAGON design used its shape-shifting capabilities to squeeze through gaps, the upgraded version can manipulate objects.
A team of roboticists has unveiled an upgrade shape-shifting drone robot, building on the original DRAGON platform to create a device, which can pick up and move objects — and even twist a pipe valve shut with rotor thrust alone.
The JSK Lab team showed off the original design for DRAGON — a name someone painstakingly backronymed from "dual-rotor embedded multilink robot with the ability of multi-degree aerial transformation" — four years ago, demonstrating a modular design that is capable of changing its layout mid-air in order to squeeze through gaps inaccessible to a fixed-shape drone.
In the years since, the team has been at work improving the design — and now it can not only change its shape to pass through tight gaps but is also capable of manipulating the environment around it. In the team's latest video demonstration, the upgraded DRAGON is shown grasping at and turning a pipe valve handle in order to open or close the valve and adjust steam coming from a vent at the end; another video shows the robot picking up objects for transportation.
"The key to performing stable manipulation and grasping in the air is the usage of rotor vectoring apparatus having two degrees-of-freedom," the team explains in one of the two papers detailing the improvements, brought to our attention by IEEE Spectrum. "First, a comprehensive flight control methodology for aerial transformation using the vectorable thrust force is developed with the consideration of the dynamics of vectoring actuators. This proposed control method can suppress the oscillation due to the dynamics of vectoring actuators and also allow the integration with external and internal wrenches for object manipulation and grasping.
"Second, an online thrust-level planning method for bimanual object grasping using the two ends of this articulated model is presented. The proposed grasping style is unique in that the vectorable thrust force is used as the internal wrench instead of the joint torque."
More information on the new DRAGON's capabilities are available in letters published in The International Journal of Robotics Research and IEEE Robotics and Automation, both under closed-access terms.