Design and Control of Aerial Modules for Inflight Self-Disassembly

Abstract

Robotic modular systems have the ability to create and break physical links to self-assemble larger custom robots for general tasks. In case of changes in the task or the environment, they can dynamically self-adapt by self-reconfiguring during the mission. However, applying these concepts to flying vehicles is still a challenge. In this letter, we present a novel modular design based on a quadrotor platform that uses a lightweight passive mechanism to dock and undock in midair. Using this mechanism and a control strategy, we can divide a rectangular structure into two sub-structures during the flight. The undocking action can be sequentially applied to disassemble structures into individual modules. Since self-assembly methods for aerial vehicles have been proposed in the literature, here we focus on the self-disassembly process. We validate our undocking method and self-disassembly algorithm through experiments with actual modules. We highlight that combining our proposed self-disassembly algorithm and existing self-assembly algorithms, aerial modules are able to perform inflight self-reconfiguration.