Fixed-geometry aerial robots perform well in open environments but face major limitations in cluttered and confined spaces, where a single arm span forces tradeoffs among maneuverability, stability, and accessibility. These constraints are especially relevant to future space missions involving inspection, navigation, and adaptive robotic operation within spacecraft, orbital habitats, and other constrained mission environments. MORPH addresses this challenge through a transforming aerial platform designed around power-aware reconfiguration and a simulation-to-flight optimization pipeline.

MORPH employs servo-actuated rotating arms that pivot relative to a central body, allowing the vehicle to transition between multiple flight geometries during operation. This enables the platform to adapt its physical footprint to mission demands while maintaining controllability across changing dynamic conditions. The prototype uses EDF (Electric Ducted Fan) propulsion, whose compact and shrouded design supports safer operation near walls, structures, and sensitive hardware. In this work, the EDF system serves as a terrestrial test surrogate rather than a spacecraft propulsion system, providing a practical and repeatable platform for evaluating reconfiguration dynamics, controller adaptation, and power-aware transition behavior relevant to future robotic spacecraft and space robotic systems.

The core contribution of MORPH is an end-to-end workflow that couples a model-based simulation framework with a fully realized transforming prototype to co-design geometry states, transformation trajectories, and control strategy. The simulation framework predicts configuration-dependent thrust and torque behavior, reconfiguration-induced transients, and power-demand spikes, enabling remote retuning and optimization before and during deployment. Experimental evaluation demonstrates stable flight across multiple configurations, controlled mid-flight transformations without loss of stability, power-aware transitions that remain within electrical limits, and agreement between simulation predictions and measured flight behavior. These results establish MORPH as a practical framework for adaptive aerial robotics and as a space-relevant analogue platform for studying remotely tunable, reconfigurable robotic systems for constrained mission environments.

My name is Jared Acosta, I recently graduated with my Masters in Electrical Engineering from Cal Poly Pomona. I got my Bachelors in Computer Engineering from San Diego State University, and I got my Associates in Computer Information Systems from Victor Valley College.

I have an interest in the robotics and space technology industries

jaredacosta3@gmail.com jaredacosta@cpp.edu