US Patent Issued to Arizona Board of Regents on Behalf of Arizona State University on March 11 for "Systems and methods for a transformable unmanned aerial vehicle with coplanar and omnidirectional features" (Arizona Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 12 -- United States Patent no. 12,246,861, issued on March 11, was assigned to Arizona Board of Regents on Behalf of Arizona State University (Tempe, Ariz.).

"Systems and methods for a transformable unmanned aerial vehicle with coplanar and omnidirectional features" was invented by Shi Lu (Mesa, Ariz.), Yan Chen (Chandler, Ariz.), Konstantinos Tsakalis (Chandler, Ariz.) and Armando Rodriguez (Tempe, Ariz.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A transformable Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), can operate as a coplanar hexacopter or as an omnidirectional multirotor based on different operation modes. The UAV has 100% force efficiency for launching or landing tasks in the coplanar m...