A Morphing Cargo Drone for Safe Flight in Proximity of Humans

Abstract

Delivery drones used by logistics companies today are equipped with unshielded propellers, which represent a major hurdle for in-hand parcel delivery. The exposed propeller blades are hazardous to unsuspecting bystanders, pets, and untrained users. One solution to provide safety is to enclose a drone with an all-encompassing protective cage. However, the structures of existing cage designs have low density in order to minimize obstruction of propeller airflow, so as to not decrease efficiency. The relatively large openings in the cage do not protect hands and fingers from fast rotating propellers. Here we describe a novel approach to safety and aerodynamic efficiency by means of a high-density cage and morphing arms loosely inspired by the box turtle. The drone cage is made of a dense and lightweight grid. When flying in proximity of humans, the arms and propellers are retracted and fully sealed within the cage, thus making the drone safe and also reducing the total footprint. When flying at cruising altitude far from people and objects, the arms and propellers extend out of the protective grid, thus increasing aerodynamic efficiency by more than 20%.

Downside Up:Rethinking Parcel Position for Aerial Delivery

“…The new approach of placing a parcel above the propeller plane should spur the development of new cargo delivery drone designs capitalizing on the compactness, efficiency and functionality of the strategic parcel placement. Future work will be focused on the design of a compact protective cage around the propellers [31] and investigating the influence of parcel size on the drone's cruise performance.…”

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Crowd Monitoring and Analysis

“…This work is improved from the previous results by the authors in [20,86], where similar method has been used to identify no-fly zones, such as the areas populated by the crowd and adjusting the drone flight planning according to the local legal requirements. In [87], an innovation in terms of drone hardware is proposed for cargo drone applications. The authors argued that whereas traditional propeller guards provide safety measures, they introduce performance penalties to the drone operation.…”

“…The authors have proposed a drone design with morphing arms that can be retracted during take-off and landing and extended during flight time. In addition, an 8 mm opening on the cage structure has been selected to prevent children's fingers from passing through it [87]. It should be noted that whereas some jurisdictions have drafted their regulations, there is no international standard for the airworthiness of drones, which has caused a lot of drone incidents during events involving crowd presence [88].…”

Towards a new design with generic modeling and adaptive control of a transformable quadrotor

“…Due to the unshielded propellers of delivery drones, a novel UAV that can extend and retract its four arms was fabricated and described in Ref. (14) .…”

“…All of these challenges led us to focus on the potential of transformable quadrotors. This class of drones is usually reported as unconventional quadrotors (8) , transformable multirotors (9) , foldable drones (10,11) , bio-inspired UAVs (12) , drones with extendable arms (13) , morphing geometry quadcopters (14) , tilt-arm quadrotors (15) , quadcopters with a tilting frame (16) , deformable drones (17) , agile quadrotors (18) , multilink aerial robots (19) , drones with adaptive morphology (5) , drones with changeable geometry (20) , tiltable-rotor aerial vehicles (21) , convertible drones (22) or modular drones (23) . Nowadays, the vision of researchers towards such drones and their applications has changed radically, they have opened a new interesting research field in the automation and flying robots community (24) .…”