Morphy: a Compliant and Morphologically-Aware Flying Robot
We present *Morphy*, a novel Compliant and Morphologically-aware Flying Robot that integrates sensorized flexible joints in its arms, thus enabling resilient collisions at high speeds and the ability to squeeze through openings more narrow than its nominal dimensions. The sensorized soft joints include 3D Hall-effect sensors therefore delivering real-time updates for the robot's adapting morphology, especially during collisions and other instances of physical interaction. Morphy weighs only 260 g including its battery, camera, time-of-flight depth sensing and advanced 8-core processor meaning that it is "autonomy-capable". The complete frame is built through adaptive manufacturing techniques, including elastic resin printing.
Morphy represents a new class of soft-flying robots that can facilitate unprecedented resilience through innovations both in the "body" and "brain." The novel soft body can, in turn, enable new avenues for autonomy. Collisions that previously had to be avoided have now become acceptable risks, while areas that are untraversable for a certain robot size can now be negotiated through self-squeezing. These novel bodily interactions with the environment can give rise to new types of embodied intelligence.
To demonstrate the capabilities of Morphy, we have conducted a series of rigorous experiments. These experiments are designed to test Morphy's ability to adapt its morphology in real-time, its resilience in the face of collisions, and its capacity to navigate through narrow spaces. In all cases, we present both high-rate (1069 FPS) and conventional camera footage of the experiments, alongside synchronized plots of a) the robot's motion and b) the deflection of the arms as measured onboard.
In the first experiment, to verify the performance of Morphy's morphology-aware adaptive control allocation and the system's ability to recover in case of a collision event, we command a straight trajectory and let Morphy collide at speeds up to 3 m/s. Note that in drop tests, the robot demonstrated the ability to handle collisions at least up to 7.6 m/s.
In the second experiment, we demonstrate the ability of the system to passively morph its shape and squeeze to fit through openings that are smaller than its nominal dimension. Morphy is commanded to fly a straight-line trajectory while a wedged-shaped obstacle is placed in its path.
In the third final experiment, we showcase the same ability but in the vertical direction. The robot is commanded to fly a straight-line trajectory and safely squeeze through a vertical wedge, more narrow than its nominal dimension.
Some baseline specs of Morph are as follows:
Weight: 260 g
Primary dimension: 25.2 cm
Thrust-to-weight ratio: 3.3
Endurance (with battery reaching 20%): 12min30sec
This work is currently under review. If you are interested, please contact us at:
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