Researchers have built a drone that can walk, hop, and jump into flight with the aid of birdlike legs, greatly expanding the range of potential environments accessible to unmanned aerial vehicles.
EPFL researchers have built a drone that can walk, hop, and jump into flight with the aid of birdlike legs, greatly expanding the range of potential environments accessible to unmanned aerial vehicles.
"Birds were the inspiration for airplanes in the first place, and the Wright brothers made this dream come true, but even today's planes are still quite far from what birds are capable of," says LIS PhD student Won Dong Shin."Birds can transition from walking to running to the air and back again, without the aid of a runway or launcher. Engineering platforms for these kinds of movements are still missing in robotics.
"Translating avian legs and feet into a lightweight robotic system presented us with design, integration, and control problems that birds have solved elegantly over the course of evolution," Floreano says."This led us to not only come up with the most multimodal winged drone to date, but also to shed light on the energetic efficiency of jumping for take-off in both birds and drones.
"Avian wings are the equivalent of front legs in terrestrial quadrupeds, but little is known about the coordination of legs and wings in birds -- not to mention drones. These results represent just a first step towards a better understanding of design and control principles of multimodal flying animals, and their translation into agile and energetically efficient drones," Floreano says.Won Dong Shin, Hoang-Vu Phan, Monica A. Daley, Auke J. Ijspeert, Dario Floreano.
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