Abstract
Aerial robots operating in cluttered environments may encounter openings narrower than their nominal width. Existing passively morphing drones reduce their width upon traversal, but they typically involve human-made designs, which can struggle to find the right balance among folding ratio, flight efficiency, and control tracking performance. We introduce a closed-loop design method that jointly optimizes quadrotor geometry and the torque-deflection response of two passively folding arms driven by the success rate in simulation for contact-mediated gap traversal. An optimization algorithm samples candidate designs that are evaluated in a contact-based simulation of the traversal task, where the task success rate is used as a feedback signal to sample progressively better designs over time. The resulting prototype passively reduces its width from 31.3 to 14.1 cm and traverses a 15 cm wide opening at a 2 m/s reference speed. It also tolerates gap approach-angle errors of up to 30 degrees and folds through a 40 cm long confined passage. Compared to a rigid twin, the soft configuration adds only 2 mm of position RMSE and less than 1% electrical power during contact-free flight. These results show that task-driven closed-loop design optimization can produce passively morphing airframes that are compact under contact, tolerant to approach error, and effectively rigid during nominal flight.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09272
