MorphEUS: Morphable Omnidirectional Unmanned System

TL;DR

MorphEUS is a novel morphable omnidirectional drone that independently controls position and orientation, offering enhanced force reachability, resilience, and suitability for complex inspection tasks, supported by theoretical control guarantees and high-fidelity simulations.

Contribution

Introduction of MorphEUS, a morphable omnidirectional quadrotor with independent control of position and orientation, and a control pipeline with proven controllability and stability.

Findings

Higher and more uniform force/torque reachability compared to state-of-the-art OMAVs.

Resiliency to rotor or servo-motor failures.

Effective trajectory tracking demonstrated in high-fidelity simulations.

Abstract

Omnidirectional aerial vehicles (OMAVs) have opened up a wide range of possibilities for inspection, navigation, and manipulation applications using drones. In this paper, we introduce MorphEUS, a morphable co-axial quadrotor that can control position and orientation independently with high efficiency. It uses a paired servo motor mechanism for each rotor arm, capable of pointing the vectored-thrust in any arbitrary direction. As compared to the \textit{state-of-the-art} OMAVs, we achieve higher and more uniform force/torque reachability with a smaller footprint and minimum thrust cancellations. The overactuated nature of the system also results in resiliency to rotor or servo-motor failures. The capabilities of this quadrotor are particularly well-suited for contact-based infrastructure inspection and close-proximity imaging of complex geometries. In the accompanying control pipeline, we present theoretical results for full controllability, almost-everywhere exponential stability, and thrust-energy optimality. We evaluate our design and controller on high-fidelity simulations showcasing the trajectory-tracking capabilities of the vehicle during various tasks. Supplementary details and experimental videos are available on the project webpage.