Last month, we wrote about ETH Zurich's Omnicopter, a flying cube with rotors providing thrust in lots of different directions that allow the drone to translate and rotate arbitrarily. This is very handy, for lots of different reasons, but the Omnicopter itself is rather bulky and seems destined to live out its life in a Swiss laboratory. A team of undergrads at ETH Zurich has taken the idea behind the Omnicopter and designed an even more versatile flying robot. Voliro offers the same kind of decoupled position and attitude control, except that instead of a cube full of rotors oriented in different directions, this drone uses rotating nacelles that can turn it from a traditional hexcopter into something much more versatile and acrobatic. Voliro is part of a focus project at ETH Zurich's Autonomous Systems Lab that's intended to give students in the last year of their undergraduate degrees "the opportunity to design a complete system from scratch," which seems like a fantastic way of making the transition into graduate school with some practical robotics experience. The disadvantage of Voliro over a drone like the Omnicopter is complexity: Those rotating nacelles add more degrees of freedom (and more points of failure) to the overall design.