[Submitted on 16 Sep 2026]
Title:A Morphing Aerial Robot With Thruster-Integrated Flexible Continuum Links for Shape Adaptive Aerial Manipulation
View a PDF of the paper titled A Morphing Aerial Robot With Thruster-Integrated Flexible Continuum Links for Shape Adaptive Aerial Manipulation, by Eri Sawada and 4 other authors
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Abstract:In recent years, aerial manipulation has attracted increasing attention as a key to expand the application of aerial robots. In this work, we focus on two major research directions for achieving versatile aerial manipulation: (i) acquiring high environmental adaptability using soft manipulators, and (ii) expanding the feasible wrench space by distributing thrusters along the manipulator. However, no aerial robot has simultaneously satisfied these two requirements. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a morphing rotor-distributed aerial robot with flexible continuum links that achieves both high shape adaptability and an expanded wrench space. The flexible continuum links function as soft manipulators, passively conforming to the shape of the environment, while the thrusters distributed along the continuum links expand the feasible thrust wrench space and enable the end-effector to exert large interaction forces. To realize the proposed robot, it is essential to suppress vibrations of the lightweight continuum links. Thus, we develop a composite leaf-spring structure that provides both high torsional and vertical stiffness, and vibration-suppressing control methods. Using these implementations, we demonstrate stable flight and a variety of aerial manipulation tasks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to realize aerial manipulations using flexible links with an integrated thruster.
Comments: Accepted to 2026 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
Subjects:
Robotics (cs.RO)
Cite as: arXiv:2609.19328 [cs.RO]
(or arXiv:2609.19328v1 [cs.RO] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.19328
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Eri Sawada [view email] [v1] Wed, 16 Sep 2026 18:47:47 UTC (5,407 KB)
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