Flexible and Reconfigurable Drone Developed By Hyderabad Researchers Aims to Be An Alternative to Delivery Drones

April 7, 2021: According to a report by Edexlive, researchers at Hyderabad’s International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) have unveiled a working model of Elasticopter, a dynamic and flexible drone that changes shape according to the size of the package it lifts. With a flexible chassis and ability to expand or collapse, it can easily grip and match the shape of the parcel that needs to be lifted. Thus, the mass is always centred and allows optimal battery performance. Moreover, it has huge stability, thanks to the positioning of its propellers.

In this regard, a robotics researcher from the Robotics Research Centre, Suraj Bonagiri, in his research, emphasized the limitations of existing delivery drones and thus proposed this novel design. The patent-pending design has zero prop wash interference with the payload irrespective of its size.

Suraj has made this design under the able guidance of professors Spandan Roy and Madhava Krishna. According to him, in existing drones, though they can lift and deliver packages of different shapes, they have short flight time and battery life. This becomes cumbersome when there are large-scale delivery operations that need to be fulfilled. The proud creator of this new type of drone thinks that the sky is the limit for its applications - from a large agricultural spray tank to a megaphone for distributing public information about the Covid-19 vaccination program. Moreover, the Elasticopter scores over other delivery drones as it occupies minimum space and takes little time to attach or detach itself to parcels.