Foldable Drone Changes Its Shape in Mid-Air - SystemsEngineeringCoaching.com

EPFL and the University of Zurich have created a drone that is able to fold itself while in flight. A servo motor is located in each of the drone’s arms which helps spin the propeller as it is swerving through the air. Since it is a compact drone once it is folded, it is able to avoid many external disturbances that other drones of larger sizes cannot avoid. This helps it capture much more footage due to being air-bound for much longer periods.

Key Takeaways:

Unlike humanoids which can easily change their shape, quadrotors cannot but quadrotors are fast, cheap, and capable of performing several tasks.
Although there have been drones in the past that could change their shape in flight, the foldable drone in the article has arms which can rotate independently.
The configuration of the foldable drone arms could be asymmetric and some configurations of the arms are: completely unfolded (“X morphology”), completely folded (“O”), and straight line (“H”).

“The (relatively) simple design helps the Folding Drone maintain both efficiency and versatility, allowing it to operate autonomously with onboard sensing and computing. It doesn’t sound like the drone can autonomously decide how to reconfigure itself to get past an obstacle yet, but the researchers are definitely working on that.”