MorphQuad: Morphable Quadrotor for Superhuman Maneuverability, Manipulation, and Resiliency

José Díaz Peón González Pacheco^*, Jiawei Xu^*, Andrew Zhao^*, Hongyu Zhou^†, Atharva Navsalkar^†, Andrew Scheffer^†, Amrith Malli Reddi^†, Sashreek Shankar^†, Yuqing (Ivan) Bao^†, Vasileios Tzoumas

Aerospace Engineering, University of Michigan

^*Equal first-author contribution ^†Equal second-author contribution

Preliminary results appeared at ICRA 2025 OCRAIM Workshop Paper

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We present a morphable quadrotor that enables hand-like aerial physical interaction via omnidirectional free and in-contact flight — to transform infrastructure maintenance, contact inspection, and emergency response. The platform can perch, push, and pull in arbitrary directions, actuate inclined valves, and perform helical multi-revolution maneuvers to inspect pipes. We demonstrate autonomous operation with resiliency to wind, rotor-wake, and physical push/pull disturbances.

Key Capabilities

Maneuverability

Reaching remote locations, traversing tight spaces, and inspecting complex infrastructure, such as around and in-between pipes and ducts from any direction.

Manipulation

Turning valves, pushing obstacles away, and pressing sensors against infrastructure to assess structural integrity.

Resiliency

Moving and applying forces with accuracy despite challenging disturbances, such as wind, wall, ceiling, and ground effects, and counter-acting contact forces, e.g., friction.

Method

Key to our approach is a co-design of hardware and control. On the hardware side, each of the four rotor systems is independently articulated via two-axis gimbals, enabling omnidirectional thrust vectoring across the full 6-DoF workspace. On the control side, we introduce an energy-optimal thrust allocation that achieves maximum thrust vectoring in any direction, paired with a generalized geometric controller that is almost-globally stable and augmented with disturbance adaptation for robustness to wind, wake, and contact forces. The thrust allocation permits inter-rotor cancellation only when needed to avoid downwash interference and mechanical gimbal lock, eliminating the wasteful cancellations of prior omnidirectional designs.

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 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), OCRAIM Workshop},
    year      = {2025},
    url       = {https://iral-morphable.github.io/}
}