Prof. Antonio Franchi has received the Best Paper Award at the 2026 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS) for the paper:
“Muscle Coactivation in the Sky: Geometry and Pareto Optimality of Energy vs. Aerodynamic Promptness and Multirotors as Variable Stiffness Actuators.”
ICUAS is one of the major annual conferences in unmanned aircraft systems and aerial robotics, bringing together researchers from robotics, control, autonomy, and flying-system applications.
The awarded work introduces a new perspective on redundancy in multirotor aerial robots. Instead of viewing redundancy only as extra actuation freedom to be resolved by standard allocation methods, the paper studies it as a deeper geometric and dynamical structure.
More specifically, the work shows that redundancy can be used not only to reduce effort, but also to increase what Prof. Franchi calls “aerodynamic promptness”, namely the ability of a multirotor to react more rapidly through its available actuation. In this sense, a redundant multirotor can exhibit an aerodynamic analogue of muscle co-contraction, trading endurance for dynamic readiness.
A central result of the paper is that this trade-off between energy and promptness is not merely heuristic, but is deeply linked to the geometry of the nonlinear task fibers and to the Riemannian metric defined on the manifold of rotor speeds associated with multirotor actuation. The work also establishes a mathematical isomorphism with variable stiffness actuators, showing that some redundancy mechanisms in aerial robots can be understood through the same structural lens used in bio-inspired and compliant robotic actuation.
This opens a new way of analyzing and designing aerial robotic systems, especially when responsiveness, interaction capabilities, and internal actuation structure matter. In the longer term, such a perspective could also have important implications for safety and certification, particularly for aerial robots operating in extreme weather conditions or other highly demanding environments, where the ability to formally understand and tune dynamic readiness may become crucial for reliable flight envelopes and robust operation.
The work is part of a broader research direction on the structure of redundancy in aerial robots, with possible implications for future multirotor design, control allocation, and physical interaction.
For readers interested in going deeper, the full conference presentation talk is available on YouTube, and the paper is openly accessible as an arXiv preprint.
Links
- YouTube talk: https://youtu.be/Si7qSJGYRaM
- arXiv preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.14222
