With the promise of greater safety and adaptability, modular reconfigurable
uncrewed air vehicles have been proposed as unique, versatile platforms holding
the potential to replace multiple types of monolithic vehicles at once.
State-of-the-art rigidly assembled modular vehicles are generally
two-dimensional configurations in which the rotors are coplanar and assume the
shape of a “flight array”. We introduce the Dodecacopter, a new type of modular
rotorcraft where all modules take the shape of a regular dodecahedron, allowing
the creation of richer sets of configurations beyond flight arrays. In
particular, we show how the chosen module design can be used to create
three-dimensional and fully actuated configurations. We justify the relevance
of these types of configurations in terms of their structural and actuation
properties with various performance indicators. Given the broad range of
configurations and capabilities that can be achieved with our proposed design,
we formulate tractable optimization programs to find optimal configurations
given structural and actuation constraints. Finally, a prototype of such a
vehicle is presented along with results of performed flights in multiple
configurations.

Este artículo explora los viajes en el tiempo y sus implicaciones.

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