Next-gen Energy-aware MOrphological Rotorcraft for resilient Environmental missions

Objective

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs, commonly known as drones) are becoming increasingly vital for environmental monitoring, disaster response, precision agriculture, and inspection of critical infrastructure. However, available platforms face clear limitations: quadrotors offer agility but lack endurance, fixed-wing UAVs lack maneuverability, and tiltrotors struggle with actuator complexity and unreliable performance during mode transitions. These constraints hinder reliable use in mission-critical scenarios such as wildfire tracking, flood mapping, or long-term ecological surveys. NEMORE (Next-generation Energy-aware Morphological Rotorcraft for Resilient Environmental missions) addresses these challenges with a novel quad-tiltrotor UAV featuring independent tilting rotors and an energy-regenerative architecture. Unlike conventional drones that treat energy as a constraint, NEMORE integrates energy harvesting into the control loop, enabling longer missions and adaptive performance. A holistic design approach combines UAV morphology, hybrid multi-mode control, and wind-aware autonomy into a unified framework, allowing the system to exploit favorable currents and ensure resilience in turbulent conditions. The fellowship will be hosted at the University of Bologna, with an outgoing phase at the University of California, Santa Cruz, under world-leading experts in hybrid and adaptive control. This project will deliver a validated UAV prototype, open-source tools, and high-impact publications, while providing the researcher with advanced interdisciplinary training and career development.