Academic, 2021
A Foldable Drone

Final Project for SCI-6476 Transformable Design Methods
Groupwork with Lexing Cao
Advisor : Chuck Hoberman

Introduction

In our class on transformable design, we decided to take a crack at making something pretty cool—a drone that could deploy its wings just by pushing or pulling it. We were really into figuring out how to make stuff transform to work better. The whole idea was to use simple moves to make the drone do some pretty complex shape-shifting. The plan was to make a drone that could adapt its form through basic mechanics. Honestly, it was as much about learning from the attempt as it was about getting it to fly. So, we dove into this project, hoping to pull off something out of the ordinary. It was ambitious, trying to mix all these design and mechanical principles. And, well, let’s just say the drone had more crashes than successful flights. But hey, that’s all part of experimenting with new ideas, right? It turned into a pretty good lesson on the ups and downs of trying to bring a cool concept into the real world. Here are some videos and animations from the project:

Cutting up the drone parts

Then we crashed it because of a control surface failure