DRAGON Drone Can Transform Itself in Midair to Fit Through Narrow Openings

Drones are usually configured in just a few ways, like quad-rotors in square or X layout, because that makes them stable in flight. Those configurations make it easy for the flight controller to make the fine adjustments necessary for predictable flight, while also allowing for agility and maneuverability. But, that setup doesn’t work well in cramped areas, especially when the drone is large. That’s why researchers from the University of Tokyo’s JSK Lab have created a drone that can transform when the situation calls for it.

DRAGON stands for Dual-rotor embedded multilink Robot with the Ability of multi-deGree-of-freedom aerial transformatiON. While that acronym is questionable at best, it does do a pretty good job of describing the flying robot. DRAGON is a connected series of modules that each have two ducted props, along with the rest of the hardware you’d find on a standard drone. Each module is a segment in a chain that makes up the complete DRAGON drone, and those segments are connected to each other with a pair of servos, giving each segment two degrees of freedom with its neighbor.

What that all means, aside from a headache-inducing acronym, is that DRAGON can change its shape in midair in order to fit through tight areas. It can start in a nice and stable square shape, and then transform into a line, an L shape, an Z shape, or whatever else is necessary. That takes some complex math, which is handled by an Intel Euclid development kit. Euclid has been discontinued now, but the Intel Aero provides similar functionality. With some more development, DRAGON’s creators think that it will be useful for operations in close quarters that require a large, but flexible, drone.