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arXiv · 2607.02764

MorphQuad: Morphable Quadrotor for Superhuman Maneuverability, Manipulation, and Resiliency

Jose Diaz Peon Gonzalez Pacheco·Jiawei Xu·Andrew Zhao·Hongyu Zhou·Atharva Navsalkar·Andrew Scheffer·Amrith Malli Reddi·Sashreek Shankar·Yuqing Bao·Vasileios Tzoumas
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Abstract

Infrastructure maintenance, contact-based inspection, and emergency response can benefit from aerial vehicles that act as a flying human hand with extreme maneuverability, manipulation, and resiliency (MMR): maneuverability to fly in arbitrary orientations to reach remote and tight locations; manipulation to point sensors, turn valves, and press tools at arbitrary orientations; resiliency to maintain accurate motion and force control despite disturbances from arbitrary directions, such as wind, ground effects, and friction. Realizing MMR on aerial vehicles requires not only omnidirectional flight; it also requires (I) vectoring of maximum thrust in any direction, to maximize capacity for contact-force application and disturbance rejection, (II) global stability, to enable control over any orientation/position, and (III) compact, standard designs that build upon platforms such as quadrotors to inherit technological know-how. No current aerial vehicle simultaneously enables I--III, due to structural and control limitations that constrain actuation. We present MorphQuad: a morphable quadrotor that enjoys MMR. Key to our approach is a hardware and control co-design: on hardware, we independently articulate each of the four rotor systems via two-axis gimbals; on control, we introduce globally-stable control, and energy-optimal thrust allocation that permits inter-rotor thrust cancellations only to avoid downwash interference and gimbal lock. With fully-onboard autonomy, MorphQuad demonstrates multi-revolution rotation while translating or hovering, for pipe inspection and target tracking (maneuverability); valve turning, perching, and object pressing and pushing with human-level strengths (manipulation); and wind rejection from any direction, even directed to a single rotor, and push-pull recovery (resiliency).

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Jose Diaz Peon Gonzalez Pacheco, Jiawei Xu, Andrew Zhao, Hongyu Zhou, Atharva Navsalkar, Andrew Scheffer, Amrith Malli Reddi, Sashreek Shankar, Yuqing Bao, Vasileios Tzoumas. 2026-07-02. MorphQuad: Morphable Quadrotor for Superhuman Maneuverability, Manipulation, and Resiliency. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02764

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