The University of Tokyo’s JSK Lab flew DRAGON v1.5, a drone that changes its own shape in the air, in a live demonstration on the Komaba Campus in Tokyo.
The robot bends and curls to pass through gaps that would stop a fixed-frame drone, and it does it autonomously, using only its onboard sensors. Now the project’s lead has told DroneXL where it is headed: disaster zones, and eventually the decommissioning of Japan’s wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant.
Dr. Moju Zhao, who leads DRAGON, said disaster response is one of the directions his team is actively working on. The shape-shifting design exists to reach places people cannot.
Eight Ducted Fans On Gimbals Do The Work
DRAGON is built from four articulated segments linked end to end, like a flying snake. Each segment carries two ducted fans on gimbals, giving the robot eight independently aimed thrust points instead of the four fixed rotors on a standard quadcopter.
The original DRAGON debuted in 2018, and the acronym spells out the goal: Dual-rotor embedded multilink Robot with the Ability of multi-deGree-of-freedom aerial transformatiON.
Because every fan can pivot, the drone holds itself stable in almost any body position. It can stretch into a straight line or coil into a tighter shape while the gimballed fans keep redirecting thrust through the change.
A normal quadcopter has one shape and keeps it. DRAGON treats its shape as something it can change in flight, which is what lets it slip through a gap narrower than its own extended length.
Onboard Sensors Make The Transformation Autonomous
The result that mattered at the Komaba demo was autonomy. The lab says DRAGON v1.5 is the first morphing aerial robot to fly and reconfigure fully on its own, using only the sensors on its body. A 3D LiDAR maps the space, an IMU tracks motion, and joint encoders report the angle of every segment in real time. The onboard computer fuses all of it with no external tracker feeding it position data.
That is harder than it sounds. Every time a joint bends, the robot’s center of gravity shifts and its thrust vectors change, so the controller has to rebalance and re-aim eight fans fast enough to stop a tumble. Doing that with onboard computing alone is the part that took years.
A drone that can shrink to slip through a tight gap and then open back up again? I keep picturing it reaching people nobody else can get to. Earthquake rubble is the first thing that comes to mind, the pockets where someone is trapped and no rigid drone or rescuer can fit.
Zhao Tells DroneXL The Target Is Places People Cannot Go
Deploying this type of robot in disaster-response scenarios is one of the directions we are actively working on, especially given the strong need for such technologies in Japan, Zhao told DroneXL. He pointed to the core motivation behind the design. The ability to reach places that are inaccessible or unsafe for humans is one of the key motivations behind DRAGON, he said.
Japan has hard reasons to want this. Earthquakes and aging infrastructure create exactly the confined, hazardous spaces a morphing drone is built to enter. A machine that can fold thin to pass an obstacle and open back up to fly is a different tool from a rigid quadcopter that either fits or does not.
Battery Life And Durability Are The Real Barriers
Zhao was direct about what stands between the demo and a deployed unit. The biggest challenges for real-world deployment are the limited flight time because of the onboard batteries and the durability in harsh environments, he said.
Neither problem is unique to DRAGON, but both bite harder on a robot this complex. Eight ducted fans and an onboard computer draw real power, which caps how long the drone can stay in a collapse or a reactor building before it has to come back. Harsh environments, the dust and radiation of a damaged plant, punish hardware that has to keep precise joints moving.
He is optimistic anyway. Both challenges are steadily improving as hardware and software technologies continue to advance, and we believe they can eventually be overcome, Zhao said.
A Role In The Fukushima Cleanup
The clearest target he named is one of the hardest jobs in the country. We are also involved in a large national project related to the decommissioning of the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant, he told DroneXL. The DRAGON robot is expected to replace human activities in such dangerous situations.
That reframes the whole project. The Fukushima Daiichi decommissioning is a decades-long effort to take apart a wrecked reactor complex where radiation makes sustained human work impossible. A drone that can shape itself to navigate tight, irradiated interiors is not a novelty there. It is a way to keep people out of a place that can kill them.
DroneXL’s Take
For most DroneXL readers a snake-shaped robot with eight ducted fans will never replace the quad in the truck, and it is not meant to. What changed with this story is that the people building it told us plainly where it is going. It is disaster work, and a reactor that still cannot be safely entered by humans more than a decade after it failed.
My take is this research deserves more fuel, not less. Push it on two fronts, a tougher structure and more muscle, and you get a machine that can actually push into a wrecked building and look for survivors. That is the version worth building toward.
Zhao did not put a date on any of it, and he was honest about the battery and durability walls still in the way. What is worth watching is the Fukushima project, because that is a real deadline with national weight behind it. If DRAGON earns a job inside that cleanup, the shape-shifting drone stops being a lab demo and becomes a tool doing work no human should have to.
Photo credit: Moju Zhao
