Shape-Shifting Morphy Drone
Researchers from the Autonomous Robots Lab, led by Dr. Kostas Alexis, have developed Morphy, a shape-shifting drone designed to squeeze through narrow spaces. It achieves this by using sensor-equipped flexible joints in its arms, thus enabling resilient collisions at high speeds and the ability to squeeze through openings more narrow than its nominal dimensions.



Morphy weighs in a just 260 g including its battery, camera, time-of-flight depth sensing as well as advanced 8-core processor. This “autonomy-capable” drone boasts a frame built through adaptive manufacturing techniques, including elastic resin printing, that the researchers hope one day can give rise to new types of embodied intelligence.

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Shape-Shifting Morphy Drone

To demonstrate the capabilities of Morphy, we have conducted a series of rigorous experiments. These experiments are designed to test Morphy’s ability to adapt its morphology in real-time, its resilience in the face of collisions, and its capacity to navigate through narrow spaces. In all cases, we present both high-rate (1069 FPS) and conventional camera footage of the experiments, alongside synchronized plots of a) the robot’s motion and b) the deflection of the arms as measured onboard,” said Kostas.

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