Capturing Motion,
Crafting Stories

Overview
This video presents the IROS 2025 research "FLOAT Drone" by the team of Prof. Fei Gao at Zhejiang University. It showcases an innovative, fully-actuated coaxial aerial robot designed for low-disturbance, high-precision close-proximity operations.

Core Innovations & Challenges:

Conventional UAVs face significant challenges in close-proximity tasks: dynamic coupling, bulky designs, and rotor-induced airflow disturbances. FLOAT Drone overcomes these with two key innovations:

1. First Integration of Control Surfaces: The drone is the first fully-actuated UAV to incorporate aerodynamic control surfaces. Utilizing Bernoulli's principle, they generate horizontal lift while significantly suppressing lateral airflow interference during interaction.

2. Coaxial Dual-Rotor Design: This configuration maintains high hovering efficiency while achieving an exceptionally compact form factor (min. projected diameter of 250mm), enabling superior environmental traversability.

The Critical Role of NOKOV Motion CaptureSystem:

Throughout the development and validation process, the NOKOV Motion Capture System provided indispensable, high-precision ground-truth position and attitude data. Its millimeter-level accuracy served as a reliable benchmark for:

• Controller Validation: Supporting the design, optimization, and verification of the hierarchical position/attitude controller.

• Dual-Mode Flight Verification: Precisely quantifying trajectory tracking accuracy (RMSE 10.2cm) and attitude stability during seamless transitions between "Fully-Actuated" and "Underactuated" flight modes.

• Dynamic Performance Evaluation: Validating the system's high-precision control capability, achieving an attitude tracking RMSE of 1.8 degrees during aggressive continuous attitude tracking experiments.

Demonstrated Applications:

The research validates FLOAT Drone's capabilities through compelling real-world experiments:

• Watering via Tilted Hover: Maintaining a stable inclined posture using its full actuation to pour water precisely.

• Traversing an Inclined Narrow Gap: Navigating stably through a 25cm-wide gap inclined at 20 degrees, thanks to its compact size.

• Operation in Confined Spaces: Pulling and pushing a deformable curtain within a minimal workspace of 30cm, demonstrating its low aerodynamic disturbance.

Relevant Links:

Project Page: https://zju-jxlin.github.io/float-drone.github.io/