"Chinese Dragon" drone, the craziest drone

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The dragon is born!

This is a dragon made up of drones, can you believe it?

Recently, Zhao Moju of the JSK Laboratory of the University of Tokyo in Japan produced a dragon robot "Dragon". The latest paper has been published in the "International Journal of Robot Research".

The dragon made of "drone" actually looks like a flying mechanical arm if you look closely, and it looks very flexible .

What can it be used for?

Without further ado, let’s get straight to the results!

What can this dragon do?

First, let me show you how to open a valve .

Come again and grab something .

(You can see that after grabbing something, the dragon can still float stably in the air)

Do you think that staying in the air is its greatest ability? You would be totally wrong to think so.

Not only is the dragon capable of carrying objects, it can also move it up, down, and forward .

Next, let "Dragon" perform some "acrobatics".

(You can’t believe it can rotate, and it can carry heavy objects)

It can perform so many functions. How does this dragon do it?

Upon closer inspection, this is not the "first show" of "Dragon". (But "Dragon" with so many functions really appeared once)

As early as 2018, Zhao Moju of the JSK Laboratory of the University of Tokyo had already produced "Dragon", but it was only a prototype at the time.

Therefore, to understand how "Dragon" achieves all this, we have to start from its prototype.

It's getting older and stronger

Let’s talk about the appearance of “Dragon” first. Overall, it looks like a dragon-shaped robot arm with four “joints” .

On each joint, there will be a pair of duct fan propellers , which can control the entire machine arm to rotate or move in any direction.

Each joint is connected by a hinge , which is the basis for the entire robot arm to move freely and change shape .

With these structures, it seems like something important is missing?

That’s right, “brain”! , you can see on the "Dragon" prototype machine that it is equipped with Intel Euclid. Intel Euclid is equivalent to a microcomputer. "Dragon" combined with it has functions such as motion tracking perception and environment recognition.

Although we have a brain, we still need neurons to transmit thoughts , so each "joint" is equipped with a distributed control panel to execute the brain's commands.

At the beginning, when the research team designed "Dragon", their original intention was just to make it "freely deformable". For example, in a relatively narrow space, it could change its shape to better adapt to the environment. It does not take into account grabbing objects or other functions.

But later on, we discovered its potential to grab objects, and the “Dragon” prototype did not perform very well in terms of stability, which led to further research.

Therefore, the new generation "Dragon" launched by JSK Laboratory made some adjustments on the original basis, added some auxiliary functions and greatly improved the stability of the entire robotic arm.

For example, when executing a hover command, the new generation of "Dragon" can hover stably in the air without the help of external force, while the previous model found it difficult to hover stably with human assistance.

On the new generation of the "Dragon" model, the researchers first proposed an integrated flight control method based on the original foundation , which comprehensively considered the dynamic characteristics of the vector drive and made the entire robot arm more stable when performing operations.

Secondly, compared with the appearance of the "Dragon" prototype, the new generation flying robot arm is also equipped with a "hand"-like thing at the end, with which it can perform functions such as turning valves.

At present, the new generation of "Dragon" is not very mature yet. The entire machine weighs 7.6 kilograms. Although it can bear a load of 3.4 kilograms, its maximum flight time is only 3 minutes.

Therefore, team members said that they are currently considering giving "Dragon" the ability to walk on the ground, which may help the robotic arm save some power.

team introduction

"Dragon" is the research result of Zhao Moju at the JSK Laboratory of the University of Tokyo, Japan .

JSK Laboratory is known as the strongest robotics laboratory in Japan . Its research content covers almost all intelligent robot research, including robot vision, driving, etc., and it publishes many top conferences and journals every year.

It is worth mentioning that Schaft, a company acquired by Google two years ago, originated from this laboratory.

This Beijing guy in the "Dragon" project: Zhao Moju , he is the main founder of the "Dragon" project and the first author of a recent paper.

△ Picture source JSK Lab

His research focuses on linkage aerial robots. He is currently a co-researcher at the JSK Robotics Laboratory and a project lecturer at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering, University of Tokyo.

References:
[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/dragon-robot-flying-manipulator
[2] https://spectrum.ieee.org/flying-dragon-robot-transforms-itself-to-squeeze-through-gaps
[3] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/02783649221112446

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