HoLoArm: Deformable Arms for Collision-Tolerant Quadrotor Flight
This work addresses the need for collision-tolerant drones in human-centric environments, providing a design that balances resilience, stability, and payload capacity.
HoLoArm introduces a quadrotor with dragonfly-inspired compliant arms that passively deform to survive collisions up to 7.6 m/s and recover within 0.3-0.6 s, while carrying a 540 g payload. A reinforcement learning control policy enhances recovery and hovering performance.
The increasing use of drones in human-centric applications highlights the need for designs that can survive collisions and recover rapidly, minimizing risks to both humans and the environment. We present HoLoArm, a quadrotor with compliant arms inspired by the nodus structure of dragonfly wings. This design provides natural flexibility and resilience while preserving flight stability, which is further reinforced by the integration of a Reinforcement Learning (RL) control policy that enhances both recovery and hovering performance. Experimental results demonstrate that HoLoArm can passively deform in any direction, including axial one, and recover within 0.3-0.6 s depending on the direction and level of the impact. The drone can survive collisions at speeds up to 7.6 m/s and carry a 540 g payload while maintaining stable flight. This work contributes to the morphological design of soft aerial robots with high agility and reliable safety, enabling operation in cluttered and human shared environments, and lays the groundwork for future fully soft drones that integrate compliant structures with intelligent control.