FOLLY: A Self Foldable and Self Deployable Autonomous Quadcopter

Abstract

Quadcopters are useful for situations such as natural disasters, military purposes, healthcare implementations and intelligent systems. In order to be entirely applicable to these engineering areas; being portable, which means a foldable mechanical design for larger quadcopters, is vital. This brings up a new research topic, namely self-arm management. Without self-arm management, the quadcopter needs to be closed manually which is a limitation to functionality and more importantly, autonomy. To best to our knowledge, this paper presents the first self-foldable and self-deployable quadcopter design, named as Folly. This feature makes Folly effortlessly applicable to autonomous systems as it is more compact and transportable. In the design of Folly, we utilized a crank-slider mechanism and spur gears that give Folly the opportunity to automatically fold and deploy its arms in 0.6s. Moreover, as a new approach to deal with vibration effects in foldable quadcopter literature, the frame material of Folly is made acrylic. Folly is also equipped with two flight modes, which are the hover flight mode, and the object-tracking mode that enables indoor usage by preventing collision and increases functionality. The paper presents real-world experimental results to show the operational efficiency of Folly.