A drone that can change shape to fit package

Gachibowli: The researchers at International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) in Hyderabad on Monday launched a flexible drone that changes its shape to fit the size of package to be lifted.

Suraj Bonagiri, a researcher from the Robotics Research Centre in his research on the mechanism behind a reconfigurable quadcopter, highlighted limitations of existing delivery drones and proposed a novel design.

"Current design of such drones focuses only on the weight of parcels to be lifted ignoring their size. Packages however come in various sizes and is an important parameter to be factored in," said the 24-year-old robotics researcher.

Since drones are typically designed to carry specific payloads, forcibly fitting and lifting inappropriate payloads will lead to instability, loss in efficiency and even compromise on safety. Unlike other rigid drones, Suraj's patent pending design which he calls 'Elasticopter' is a dynamic one.

Thanks to this flexible chassis that expands or collapses, to give a proper grip and to match the shape of the parcel to be lifted.

Under the guidance of Professors Spandan Roy and Madhava Krishna, Suraj set out to validate the superiority of his design via a series of simulations comparing current drones with the Elasticopter.

For Suraj who began his research journey into the world of drones first as an intern at RRC and then as an MS student, IIITH seemed the perfect choice. Suraj approached Product Labs with his idea where he was guided to enroll for the Technology Product Entrepreneurship (TPE) course.

"For us, this is a text book case of taking research to the market. And also something that we've always wanted to see happen, that is, our students taking their research forward to build products leading to startups. It's exciting to see some deep research taking shape," says Prakash Yalla who heads Product Labs.

"Materials movement is a key use case for this drone design," says Ramesh Loganathan, Prof. Co-Innovation who heads Outreach at IIITH. This kind of drone would behighly useful in warehouses, on manufacturing floors, e-commerce supply chain operations, medicine delivery and such where there are packages of different sizes and frequent movement is needed.

"I'd like to think of it as a multi-purpose drone. From a large agricultural spray tank for aerial spraying of fertilizers and pesticides to a megaphone for disseminating public information about the Covid-19 vaccination programme or a lockdown situation, the sky is the limit in its application", added Suraj.