Aerial Dragon Robot Reconfigures Itself into a Flying Manipulator

A couple years ago, we wrote about the Dual-rotor embedded multilink Robot with the Ability of multi-deGree-of-freedom aerial transformatiON–Dragon, of course. This is one of the most bizarre drones that we have ever seen. It consists of four pairs gimbaled ducted fans. Each pair is linked through a two axis actuated link, making it physically versatile in flight.

Dragon is one robot that has literally too many degrees of freedom. The hardware is there. The trick is to get it to reliably use the hardware in a way that’s useful. Dragon had just learned how to shrink down to fit into small spaces in 2018. Now, it can adapt its entire structure and manipulate objects.

Source:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/dragon-robot-flying-manipulator