  Morphing multirotors, such as the Foldable Drone , can increase the
versatility of drones employing in-flight-adaptive-morphology. To further
increase precision in their tasks, recent works have investigated stable flight
in asymmetric morphologies mainly leveraging the low-level controller. However,
the aerodynamic effects embedded in multirotors are only analyzed in fixed
shape aerial vehicles and are completely ignored in morphing drones. In this
paper, we investigate the effects of the partial overlap between the propellers
and the main body of a morphing quadrotor. We perform experiments to
characterize such effects and design a morphology-aware control scheme to
account for them. To guarantee the right trade-off between efficiency and
compactness of the vehicle, we propose a simple geometry-aware compensation
scheme based on the results of these experiments. We demonstrate the
effectiveness of our approach by deploying the compensation scheme on the
Foldable Drone, a quadrotor that can fold its arms around the main body. The
same set of experiments are performed and compared against one another by
activating and deactivating the compensation scheme offline or during the
flight. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work counteracting the
aerodynamic effects of a morphing quadrotor during flight and showing the
effects of partial overlap between a propeller and the central body of the
drone.
