Looking to ensure a good crop Bobby Schulz/University of Minnesota

A shape-shifting drone takes off like a helicopter and transforms into a plane in mid-air to fly all day on solar power. The drone is designed to provide affordable aerial surveys for farmers, so they can see where to irrigate and use fertiliser and herbicide only where needed.

Most drones are not appropriate for this because they have short flight times. Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos and his team at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis have therefore taken a new approach.

The Solar Unmanned Air Vehicle: Quad (SUAV:Q) takes off vertically before unfolding with the help of lightweight powered hinges into a flat, winged aircraft. Its design makes it easier to launch than a fixed-wing drone, and means it can also hover during flight to get a stable view of the land below. It morphs back into the quadcopter formation to land vertically.


“The idea is that anybody can buy this and carry it around in their pickup truck,” says Papanikolopoulos.

The drone has a wingspan of 2.1 metres and weighs just under 4 kilograms. It needs to be this big so that it can carry a multispectral camera for assessing crop health. The upper surface of the wing is covered in solar cells, yielding enough power for continuous flight during the daytime. It flies at an altitude of up to around 120 metres.

Preparing to fly

The team has so far flown the SUAV:Q in both its quadcopter and aircraft configurations, and carried out the in-flight transformation in a wind tunnel. Over the next 6 months, they will test the transition during real flights, validating their computer models and ensuring its reliability in real-world environments.

Papanikolopoulos says the team is already talking to commercial partners about bringing the SUAV:Q to the market, and hopes to make it for a cost of a few thousand dollars.

A low-cost drone with greater endurance than existing models would be very helpful to farmers and businesses that oversee large areas of crops, says Ivan Grove at Harper Adams University in Shropshire, UK. “The current range of VTOL [vertical take-off and landing aircraft] are mainly the multirotors, which suffer from short flight times in comparison to their fixed-wing counterparts.”

Although the SUAV:Q is aimed at farmers, its long flight time should make it attractive for other uses, such as inspecting infrastructure, forestry and firefighting.

Read more: Welcome to the personal drone revolution