1/28/2024 0 Comments Ieee automaton![]() There’s more potential here than just fitting through small spaces, though: The researchers conceptualize this robot as a sort of overactuated flying arm that can both form new shapes and use those shapes to interact with the world around it by manipulating objects. The video, which-spoiler alert-is actually a teaser for a 2018 IROS paper, shows the robot changing its shape in order to squeeze through a small gap, and we were told at ICRA that DRAGON is able to autonomously decide how to transform when given the constraints of the space it needs to pass through. What’s exciting, though, is why this robot was designed to transform in the first place. DRAGON can fly as a straight line, as a box, as an “L” shape, and also has more complex 3D shapes like a zigzag or a spiral. The paper presented at ICRA focused mostly on the fact that they managed to get this thing off the ground, in the air, and transforming a little bit (and there’s like four pages of math involved in that). ![]() Each link has a distributed control board (labeled “neuron”), with the ducted fan rotors controlled by electronic speed controllers (rotor ESC). A flight control unit (labeled “spinal”) with onboard IMU and Intel Euclid sits on the second link. Each link carries a pair of ducted fan thrusters (c). The DRAGON prototype has four links (a) connected through joints (b) powered by servo motors. This particular prototype is made up of four modules, allowing it to behave sort of like a quadrotor, even though I suppose technically it’s an octorotor. The modules are connected to one another with a powered hinged joint, and the whole robot is driven by an Intel Euclid and powered by a battery pack (providing 3 minutes of flight time, which is honestly more than I would have thought), mounted along the robot’s spine. Ideally, you’d want a robot that doesn’t need that level of protection, that’s somehow large and powerful but also small and nimble at the same time.Īt JSK Lab at the University of Tokyo, roboticists have developed a robot called DRAGON, which (obviously) stands for for “Dual-rotor embedded multilink Robot with the Ability of multi-deGree-of-freedom aerial transformatiON.” It’s a modular flying robot powered by ducted fans that can transform literally on the fly, from a square to a snake to anything in between, allowing it to stretch out to pass through small holes and then make whatever other shape you want once it’s on the other side.ĭRAGON is made of a series of linked modules, each of which consists of a pair of ducted fan thrusters that can be actuated in roll and pitch to vector thrust in just about any direction you need. Another solution is to put your robots in protective cages, but then you’re stuck with robots that can’t as easily interact with their environment, even if they want to. One solution is to make your robots super small, so that they can fit through small openings without running into something fragile and expensive, but then you’re stuck with small robots that can’t do a whole heck of a lot. The thing about indoors is that by definition you have to go through doors to get there, and once you’re inside, there are all kinds of things that are horribly dangerous to aerial robots, like more doors, walls, windows, people, furniture, hanging plants, lampshades, and other aerial robots, inevitably followed by still more doors. There’s been a lot of recent focus on applications for aerial robots, and one of the areas with the most potential is indoors.
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