  Robot designs can take many inspirations from nature, where there are many
examples of highly resilient and fault-tolerant locomotion strategies to
navigate complex terrains by using multi-functional appendages. For example,
Chukar and Hoatzin birds can repurpose their wings for quadrupedal walking and
wing-assisted incline running (WAIR) to climb steep surfaces. We took
inspiration from nature and designed a morphing robot with multi-functional
thruster-wheel appendages that allows the robot to change its mode of
locomotion by transforming into a rover, quad-rotor, mobile inverted pendulum
(MIP), and other modes. In this work, we derive a dynamic model and formulate a
nonlinear model predictive controller to perform WAIR to showcase the unique
capabilities of our robot. We implemented the model and controller in a
numerical simulation and experiments to show their feasibility and the
capabilities of our transforming multi-modal robot.
