Design and Development of a Reconfigurable Multi-Mode Transformer Robot for Ground and Aerial Operations

The TRANSFORMER-X combines the engineering design of a reconfigurable robotic platform, with the normal ground model, expanded ground model and aerial model. The final system level architecture comprises a set of requirements for mechanical reconfiguration, operator controlled transition between states, ground drive coordination, aerial stabilisation and safety checks based on orientation. It also co-ordinates a common supervisory control mechanism to stop motion, to verify the setup and to switch subsystems on. The design study is conducted based on kinematic, centre of gravity, thrust to weight and energy relations. The operator interface looks like a website, and allows you to choose operating modes, send control commands, check status and see the transformation. The paper describes the known architecture, interface design and requirements for formal verification. The hardware performance of mobility and experimental flight needs to be measured with instrumented prototypes and cannot be derived from the illustration of the interface.