Morph-EUS: Morphable OmnidirEctional Unmanned System

Ivan Bao, José C. Díaz Peón González Pacheco, Atharva Navsalkar, Andrew Scheffer, Sashreek Shankar, Andrew Zhao, Hongyu Zhou, Vasileios Tzoumas
University of Michigan, *Ordered Alphabetically
ICRA 2025 OCRAIM Workshop
Paper arXiv
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MorphEUS Introduction

A drone that maneuvers, manipulates, and endures all disturbances: navigates tight spaces. Turns valves. Perches. Points and tracks. Pushes and pulls. Unscathed by winds, physical displacements, and rotor failures.
At any orientation.

Key Capabilities

Omnidirectional Control

Full 6-DoF control with independent position and orientation

Aerial Manipulation

Turns valves, pushes, and pulls — performing contact tasks through physical interaction

Perching & Tracking

Perches on surfaces and points and tracks targets with precision at any attitude

Disturbance & Fault Resilience

Endures winds, physical displacements, and rotor failures through overactuated design

Simulated Applications

MorphEUS Drone
0
Degrees of Freedom
0
Rotation (degrees)
0
Servo Motors
0
Co-axial Rotors

Method

We present a novel variable-tilt co-axial quadrotor and a control pipeline that achieves a significantly higher level of maneuverability, dexterity, and efficiency. This system builds on prior work by improving omnidirectional flight capabilities while avoiding inefficient thrust cancellations. To realize this, each of the rotor pairs can be independently oriented using a pair of servo motors. This allows for full 6-DoF control of position and orientation. In the paper, we prove that the proposed controller is exponentially stable almost everywhere and energy-optimal in terms of control allocation.

MorphEUS Hardware Pipeline
Autonomous pipeline for the proposed variable-tilt morphable quadrotor.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{iral2025morpheus,
    title     = {MorphEUS: Morphable OmnidirEctional Unmanned System},
    author    = {Ivan Bao and Jos{\'e} C. D{\'\i}az Pe{\'o}n Gonz{\'a}lez Pacheco and Atharva Navsalkar and Andrew Scheffer and Sashreek Shankar and Andrew Zhao and Hongyu Zhou and Vasileios Tzoumas},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the ICRA 2025 OCRAIM Workshop},
    year      = {2025},
    note      = {To appear},
    url       = {https://iral-morphable.github.io/}
}