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arXiv · 2505.18270

MorphEUS: Morphable Omnidirectional Unmanned System

Ivan Bao·José C. Díaz Peón González Pacheco·Atharva Navsalkar·Andrew Scheffer·Sashreek Shankar·Andrew Zhao·Hongyu Zhou·Vasileios Tzoumas
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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.

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Ivan Bao, José C. Díaz Peón González Pacheco, Atharva Navsalkar, Andrew Scheffer, Sashreek Shankar, Andrew Zhao, Hongyu Zhou, Vasileios Tzoumas. 2025-05-23. MorphEUS: Morphable Omnidirectional Unmanned System. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18270

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