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

-->

[Submitted on 2 Jul 2026]

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

View a PDF of the paper titled MorphQuad: Morphable Quadrotor for Superhuman Maneuverability, Manipulation, and Resiliency, by J. Diaz Peon Gonzalez Pacheco and 9 other authors

View PDF HTML (experimental)

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).

Subjects:

Robotics (cs.RO)

Cite as: arXiv:2607.02764 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2607.02764v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.02764

arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history

From: Jose Diaz Peon Gonzalez Pacheco [view email] [v1] Thu, 2 Jul 2026 21:01:26 UTC (22,942 KB)

Full-text links:

Access Paper:

View a PDF of the paper titled MorphQuad: Morphable Quadrotor for Superhuman Maneuverability, Manipulation, and Resiliency, by J. Diaz Peon Gonzalez Pacheco and 9 other authors

View PDF

HTML (experimental)

TeX Source

view license

Current browse context:

cs.RO

new | recent | 2026-07

Change to browse by:

cs

References & Citations

NASA ADS

Google Scholar

Semantic Scholar

Loading...

Data provided by:

Bibliographic Tools

Bibliographic and Citation Tools

Bibliographic Explorer Toggle

Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)

Connected Papers Toggle

Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)

Litmaps Toggle

Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)

scite.ai Toggle

scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)

Code, Data, Media

Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article

alphaXiv Toggle

alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)

Links to Code Toggle

CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)

DagsHub Toggle

DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)

GotitPub Toggle

Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)

Huggingface Toggle

Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)

ScienceCast Toggle

ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)

Demos

Demos

Replicate Toggle

Replicate (What is Replicate?)

Spaces Toggle

Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?)

Spaces Toggle

TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?)

Related Papers

Recommenders and Search Tools

Link to Influence Flower

Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)

Core recommender toggle

CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)

Author

Venue

Institution

Topic

About arXivLabs

arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)