A highly maneuverable flying squirrel drone with controllable foldable wings
Jun-Gill Kang, Dohyeon Lee, Soohee Han
TL;DR
The paper addresses achieving agile, animal‑like maneuverability for UAVs in confined spaces by introducing a flying squirrel–inspired quadrotor with controllable foldable silicone wings. It combines a hardware crank‑slider wing mechanism, a Lyapunov‑based integral backstepping quadrotor controller, and a data‑driven learned wing controller trained via reinforcement learning from human demonstrations (residual RL). The approach demonstrates that wing‑induced aerodynamic drag can supplement thrust under saturation, enabling sharper accelerations and improved deceleration in real experiments. This work highlights the potential of biomimicry and learning‑aided control to expand the maneuverability of lightweight drones in constrained environments.
Abstract
Typical drones with multi rotors are generally less maneuverable due to unidirectional thrust, which may be unfavorable to agile flight in very narrow and confined spaces. This paper suggests a new bio-inspired drone that is empowered with high maneuverability in a lightweight and easy-to-carry way. The proposed flying squirrel inspired drone has controllable foldable wings to cover a wider range of flight attitudes and provide more maneuverable flight capability with stable tracking performance. The wings of a drone are fabricated with silicone membranes and sophisticatedly controlled by reinforcement learning based on human-demonstrated data. Specially, such learning based wing control serves to capture even the complex aerodynamics that are often impossible to model mathematically. It is shown through experiment that the proposed flying squirrel drone intentionally induces aerodynamic drag and hence provides the desired additional repulsive force even under saturated mechanical thrust. This work is very meaningful in demonstrating the potential of biomimicry and machine learning for realizing an animal-like agile drone.