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The paper presents the development of a novel deformable quad-rotor enabled aerial gripper. The mechanism of our deformable quad-rotor is based on simultaneous expansion or contraction of the quad-rotor body, which is generated by controlling a rigid elements based morphing structure (REMS). Such deformation results in a highly deformable quad-rotor that can not only perform morphological adaptation in response to environmental changes and obstacles, but also improve the flight performance by contracting to facilitate the agility/maneuverability or by expanding to enhance the stability. Meanwhile, inspired by the wasp grasping behavior, such controllable expansion and contraction from the REMS ingeniously enable a new function of aerial gripper. In this paper, we start to detail the mechanism and design of the REMS based deformable quad-rotor, then present the quad-rotor deformation enabled aerial gripper design, its dynamics modeling, the grasping function and analysis. The simulation was conducted in order to graphically show the elicited aerodynamic flow situation during expansion or contraction of the quad-rotor with and without carrying payload. Experiments were further implemented to validate the grasping function of the gripper and the flight performance of the quad-rotor. Finally, two case studies on the new aerial gripper were performed. All results demonstrate the excellent performance of the deformable quad-rotor enabled aerial gripper, that is, it has the advantages of both flight maneuverability and grasping capability during performing tasks.
Zhao et al. (Mon,) studied this question.