Embodied Intelligence for Sustainable Flight: A Soaring Robot with Active Morphological Control

TL;DR

This paper introduces Floaty, a shape-changing soaring robot that passively harnesses wind energy for agile, energy-efficient flight, demonstrating significant power savings and robust maneuverability in turbulent airflows.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel morphological control approach for a shape-changing robot that enables passive soaring and precise control without active propulsion, reducing energy consumption.

Findings

Floaty can hover and maneuver in wind speeds up to 10 m/s.

It achieves a power consumption of 10 W/kg, much lower than traditional thruster systems.

Experimental results validate its stability and control in turbulent conditions.

Abstract

Achieving both agile maneuverability and high energy efficiency in aerial robots, particularly in dynamic wind environments, remains challenging. Conventional thruster-powered systems offer agility but suffer from high energy consumption, while fixed-wing designs are efficient but lack hovering and maneuvering capabilities. We present Floaty, a shape-changing robot that overcomes these limitations by passively soaring, harnessing wind energy through intelligent morphological control inspired by birds. Floaty's design is optimized for passive stability, and its control policy is derived from an experimentally learned aerodynamic model, enabling precise attitude and position control without active propulsion. Wind tunnel experiments demonstrate Floaty's ability to hover, maneuver, and reject disturbances in vertical airflows up to 10 m/s. Crucially, Floaty achieves this with a specific power consumption of 10 W/kg, an order of magnitude lower than thruster-powered systems. This introduces a paradigm for energy-efficient aerial robotics, leveraging morphological intelligence and control to operate sustainably in challenging wind conditions.