Andrew Zhao
Pronouns: He/Him/His
Research Mentor(s): Vasileios Tzoumas
Co-Presenter: Chukka, Laaslya
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Aerospace / Engineering
Presentation Date: April 20
Presentation Type: Poster
Session: Session 2 – 11am – 11:50am
Room: League Ballroom
Authors:
Presenter: 118
Abstract
Drones of the future will play an important role in many areas like package delivery, surveillance, and search and rescue. To perform such important tasks, they should have strong resilience against system and mechanical failures, unparalleled agility in complex environments, and the ability to be efficient at all stages of the flight. However, current drones are limited to rigid bodies which constrains their abilities to adapt to different environments and deal with possible failures or other problems encountered at different stages of the flight. This paper contributes steps towards novel drones with morphable bodies that are more reliable, agile and efficient. Beginning with an extensive literature review into pre-existing drone designs, we began to design and build our own drone with morphable capabilities to test such aspects. We coupled a gimbal design for each propeller with four foldable arms powered by servos to provide continuous 360-degree thrust vectoring while being able to change sizes and shapes during the flight. We found that the morphability aspect can provide more than a 30% decrease in quadrotor footprint and also the ability to morph into a tricopter in the case of a single arm failure. The thrust vectoring also aids in these morphable capabilities, while also allowing for more efficient flight and various different maneuvers impossible to standard quadrotors.
Engineering, Interdisciplinary
