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. It’s one of the wildest drones we’ve ever seen, consisting of four pairs of gimbaled, ducted fans, with each pair linked together through a two-axis actuated joint, making it physically flexible in flight to a crazy degree.
Dragon is one of those robots with literally more degrees of freedom than it knows what to do with—in the sense that the hardware is all there. But the trick is getting it to use that hardware to do things that are actually useful in a reliable way. In 2018, Dragon was just learning how to transform itself to fit through small spaces, but now it’s able to adapt its entire structure to manipulate and grasp objects.
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