A team of roboticists from the University of Tokyo’s JSK Lab have created a flying robot they call DRAGON (Dual-rotor embedded multilink Robot with the Ability of multi-deGree-of-freedom aerial transformatiON). A recent report by IEEE Spectrum includes a video highlighting the bot’s ability to change its shape mid-flight in order to navigate through tight spaces.
The tail of this robot is made out of a series of linked modules with ducted fan thrusters. They are connected to each other with a powered hinged joint, and the robot is driven by an Intel Euclid and powered by a battery pack for up to three minutes of flight time. Its design was originally modeled off of traditional dragon kites, where the tail is made up of a series of smaller, interlinked kites.
There’s been a lot of recent focus on applications for aerial robots, and one of the areas with the most potential is indoors. 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.
It’s not hard to imagine using an advanced version of DRAGON to navigate dangerous indoor environments, tunnels or cave systems, during rescue missions. It could search for survivors in collapsed buildings, removing rubble if necessary to free them. Ultimately, unlike its fictional counterparts, this DRAGON could save human lives.
Fan Shi, a JSK Lab member who contributed to this research describes DRAGON as “a breakthrough in hardware design which, in a beautiful way, connects a manipulation arm with a ducted fan-driven aerial robot.” The robot seems to be “an ideal platform for aerial manipulation,” he adds, “and I really look forward to its further applications and research.” We’re looking forward to the same thing.