DRAGON: a morphing inspection drone
Engineer Moju Zhao showed DRAGON, a shape‑shifting drone that can morph mid‑flight to squeeze through tight spaces — designed for inspections and delivery in complex environments. The design demonstrates how mechanical reconfiguration can expand drone utility in cluttered, confined scenes. (x.com)
DRAGON was developed at the University of Tokyo’s JSK/DRAGON Lab and the name stands for “Dual‑Rotor Embedded Multilink Robot with the Ability of multi‑degree‑of‑freedom aerial transformatiON,” with the project first appearing in public demos and papers in 2018. (spectrum.ieee.org) The prototype architecture uses multiple articulated links where each link carries two ducted fans mounted on gimbals and provides roughly two degrees of freedom per joint to enable body reconfiguration and thrust vectoring. (newatlas.com) Measured performance reported in press and lab summaries lists a mass of about 7.6 kg (16.7 lb), a demonstrated payload of roughly 3.4 kg (7.5 lb), and an on‑board endurance on the order of three minutes per charge for the early prototypes. (newatlas.com) Peer‑reviewed experiments show DRAGON performing aerial manipulation tasks including pinching, pushing, and valve rotation, and a 2022 IEEE RAL paper from Zhao et al. described “forceful valve manipulation” enabled by a thrust‑vectoring apparatus. (dragon.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp) The DRAGON line of work evolved into hybrid platforms such as SPIDAR (a multi‑limbed, vectorable‑rotor aerial‑ground robot) that the group presented as a next step toward adding terrestrial locomotion and stronger 3‑D grasping capability. (newatlas.com) Recent entries on the DRAGON Lab publications list show continued output through 2024–2025, including ICRA/ICRA‑adjacent papers on vectored‑thrust aerial grasping and a 2025 ICRA paper titled “Aerial Grasping by Multi‑Limbed Flying Robot SPIDAR” authored by Moju Zhao and collaborators. (dragon.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp)
