A squirrel-inspired drone with whole-body morphing
A soft-membrane drone that coordinates its limbs and tail to reshape the entire airframe, tuning stability, agility, and manoeuvrability.
Liming Zheng郑黎明
Liming Zheng is a researcher in bio-inspired aerial robotics at Delft University of Technology. He studies how morphology can provide embodied intelligence, allowing aerial robots to adapt to changing aerodynamic conditions and operate in complex, unstructured environments.
Inspired by animal flight, he develops morphing-wing and whole-body morphing aerial robots for adaptive flight and physical interaction. His work combines aerodynamic experiments, mechanical design, adaptive control, and real-world flight testing. His robots have demonstrated passive aerodynamic adaptation, agile gliding, whole-body morphing, and perching.
Liming is particularly interested in environmental field robotics. He helped develop a branch-perching drone for rainforest acoustic monitoring and a solar-powered aircraft for long-endurance wildlife monitoring on the Tibetan Plateau. His research has been published in Nature Communications and IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. He is currently completing his Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering at TU Delft.
Research goal: To create aerial robots that fly and adapt like living systems—and work where they are needed most.
Research Interests
- Morphology-driven intelligence
- Bio-inspired aerial robotics
- Morphing aircraft
- Adaptive flight and perching
- Field robotics and environmental monitoring
- Flight dynamics and control
Selected research
Bio-inspired aerial robots for morphing flight, aerodynamic control, and physical interaction.
Head-body coupling for pitch stability and aerodynamic braking
A colugo-inspired glider that couples head and body morphing to restore pitch stability, increase aerodynamic braking, and prepare for perching.
ALBERO: Agile landing on branches
An ultra-fast gripper and motion-planning framework that enables a quadrotor to perch dynamically on steep, naturally oriented branches.
Projects, field work, and team achievements
Systems that Liming Zheng has helped design, build, test, and deploy, including aircraft development, rainforest field robotics and international competitions.
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First place at the IMAV 2024 indoor competition
A TU Delft team project to develop and operate an autonomous drone for a wildlife-themed indoor mission involving navigation, precision landing, object interaction, and visual identification.
XPRIZE Rainforest with ETHBiodivX
A field-robotics effort using aerial systems to help survey rainforest biodiversity. TU Delft contributed a branch-perching and bioacoustics drone platform to the ETHBiodivX team.
Autonomous soaring in turbulent environments using reinforcement learning
Liming's master's thesis developed a reinforcement-learning strategy that enabled a fixed-wing UAV to search for thermal updrafts, gain altitude, and navigate toward a destination in a simulated turbulent wind field.
Bird-inspired solar aircraft and formation flight
A quiet, long-endurance fixed-wing platform developed for ecological monitoring in high-altitude regions, including field testing in Tibet. The aircraft combined an albatross-inspired high-aspect-ratio configuration, solar power, a feather-inspired morphing tail, and early formation-flight experiments.
Compact urban VTOL aircraft with active flow control
A conceptual four-seat urban aircraft combining tilting propulsion for vertical take-off and landing with blown-wing flow control. The design explored whether active flow control could reduce wing area and ground footprint while retaining useful lift and payload capability.
Air Cargo Challenge 2017
A rapid aircraft-development campaign for the international Air Cargo Challenge, where teams designed and built a fixed-wing aircraft around constrained propulsion, take-off distance, payload, and mission requirements. NPU Innovation placed sixth overall.
Ultra-light cargo aircraft
A cargo aircraft developed around an extreme mass-efficiency challenge: the airframe and onboard systems were limited to 1 kg, while take-off had to be completed within 25 m. Iterative structural and propulsion testing produced a platform capable of lifting a 6.4 kg payload.
Rapid-deployment foldable reconnaissance aircraft
A hand-launched fixed-wing aircraft designed to fit with its mission equipment inside a compact transport case. Its three-section folding wing and tail layout enabled rapid deployment while retaining a stable airframe for reconnaissance, target identification, and payload delivery tasks.
Tilting-propulsion airship
A 12 m airship developed as a long-endurance alternative to multirotors for aerial imaging and environmental monitoring. A tilting propulsion pod and three tail motors enabled vertical take-off, landing, and low-speed manoeuvring.
Publications
Journal articles, manuscripts, and conference papers spanning bio-inspired aerial robotics, morphing aircraft, environmental field robotics, and flight control.
Journal articles & manuscripts
- 2026
A squirrel-inspired drone with enhanced stability, agility and maneuverability via whole-body morphing
Nature Communications 17, 6365
- 2026
Head-body coupling inspired by gliding mammals restores pitch stability and enables aerodynamic braking for perching
Under review at Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)
- 2026
Patagium and tail morphology shape aerodynamic performance and control authority in gliding-mammal-inspired wings
Under review at Bioinspiration & Biomimetics
- 2026
Tactile memory enables active semantic exploration and sensor deployment by tiny drones
Under review at IEEE Transactions on Robotics
- 2024
ALBERO: Agile landing on branches for environmental robotics operations
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters 9(3), 2845–2852
- 2020
A novel control mode of bionic morphing tail based on deep reinforcement learning
arXiv preprint
Conference papers
- 2026
Cooking beyond frames: A stereo event camera dataset in the kitchen
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), accepted for oral presentation
- 2025
The influence of wing and tail morphology on the aerodynamics of gliding mammals
International Symposium on Adaptive Motion of Animals and Machines (AMAM)
- 2022
Using deep reinforcement learning to improve the robustness of UAV lateral-directional control
33rd Congress of the International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences (ICAS)
- 2020
Application of vector jet control technology on aircraft longitudinal control
32nd Congress of the International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences (ICAS)