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This Flying Robot Can Walk on Its Wings Like a Bat

A biomimetic robot takes inspiration from the vampire bat.

While other robots struggle to master locomo​tion in any form, this little bot can both walk on the ground and fly through the air. It's like a robot with wings, or a drone with legs.

The DALER (Deployable Air-Land Exploration Robot), designed by a project at EPFL in Switzerland, is detailed in a paper published in Bioinspirati​on and BiomimeticsRobo​Hub has a great piece on the technical challenges of making a bot that can move in more than one way.

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It looks a bit like a model airplane when it's flying, but "wingerons" at the tips of its wings allow it to use the same appendages to crawl across the floor. At this point, it becomes impossible not to anthropomorphise the multi-modal bot, as it endearingly lurches forward on its claws.

That's pretty apt, given that the robot design was inspired by an animal: a vampire bat. Researcher Ludovic Daler told me over email that his eponymous creation took inspiration from the creature since the bat uses its wings both to run and walk, and adapts them to best suit each task—like closing its wings when on the ground and opening them in the air. The advantage of this is that the robot uses the same actuators and structure for both walking and flying, which keeps its weight down.

Bats aren't the only animals that have inspired biomimetic robots with capabilities to move across different terrains. Nature is a popular starting point for robotic critters, such as the salamander-inspired Salamandra R​obotica, which can both swim and walk.

"Many animals exploit adaptive morphologies in order to accommodate the requirements imposed by different modes of locomotion," the authors on the DALER paper write. "We have shown that also this strategy is a good solution to minimize trade-offs [in performance]. Indeed, a robot optimized for flight can improve its terrestrial capabilities with foldable wings."

Daler told me that the robot is designed for search and rescue efforts, such as after a natural disaster, and that "the duality of modes of locomotion will be used principally to fly long distances to survey large spaces in a short timespan, and then to walk into dangerous or inaccessible areas."

In the future, he hopes to develop the robot so that it can take off from the ground autonomously (you can see in the video that it is currently launched by a human), so that it could return to base after completing a mission on the ground.