Dragonfly Drone: A Novel Tilt-Rotor Aerial Platform with Body-Morphing Capability

Abstract

The development of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with extended maneuverability has unlocked new applications such as complex inspection tasks at height. In this work, we introduce the Dragonfly drone, a novel tilt-rotor body-morphing UAV, capable of altering its shape and orientation without compromising its position tracking. Unlike most existing UAV designs that only target at decoupling position and orientation control, Dragonfly can also perform unique body-morphing in flight, featuring all six degrees of freedom in every morphology. This enables navigation into tight gaps with irregular shapes, conforming to obstacles of varying geometries, and maintaining physical contact with uneven surfaces. Such capabilities make our design particularly effective for complex inspection tasks at height, such as pipe or bridge inspection. Our contributions include the mechanical design of the system, the modeling and control strategies employed, and the realrobot experiments with a prototype platform. See Dragonfly drone in action: https://youtu.be/YxoV_Qt_5XE.