Creepy new drone that walks and flies is a Robopocalypse nightmare come true

A newly developed bipedal robot can seamlessly switch between walking and flying, and it is the combination of these two skills that really sets this futuristic machine apart.

Presentation of LEONARDO, or LEO for short. The name is an acronym for LEgs ONboARD drone, which but insufficiently describes this robot. The Caltech engineers who built LEO didn’t just slap a pair of robotic legs on an aerial drone, they had to design the bot thinking of both walking and flying and develop specialized software to integrate its various components.

LEO is still a prototype, a kind of proof of concept to see if a bipedal flying robot can perform tasks that would otherwise be difficult or impossible for ground robots or aerial drones to accomplish. In the future, a full-fledged version could be tasked with difficult or dangerous tasks, such as inspecting and repairing damaged infrastructure, installing new equipment in hard-to-reach places, or dealing with disasters. natural and industrial accidents. Finally, a LEO-type robot could even transport delicate equipment to the surface of a celestial body, such as Mars or Titan, Saturn’s moon. More worryingly, the agile bipedal flyer could be used in defensee or war.

LEO’s sci-fi attributes are no accident. In an email, the team told me they were inspired by the fictional flying humanoid robot Astro boy and the Iron Man-As jet suits built by Richard Browning of Gravity Industries. Ultimately, however, the goal of the project was to study the intersection of walk and flight from the perspective of dynamics and control. and to “give unprecedented walking ability and solve the problems posed by hybrid locomotion,” as the team explained in a video. The Caltech team also hopes to build adaptive landing gear for vertical take-offs and landings (VTOLs) in difficult terrain.

NOTature understood this trick a long time ago, like birds, bats, insects and many others organizations can go backsd between these two modes of locomotion. It offers a distinct evolutionary advantage. Robots, on the other hand, tend to be specialized and able to move in only one of these two ways. There are pros and cons to this: Ground robots are sure-footed, sturdy and capable of carrying heavy loads, but they struggle in difficult terrain and cannot reach heights. Aerial drones are highly mobile and able to fly in all kinds of environments, but they cannot stay aloft for long due to the high energy demand of flight, and they are bad at performing manipulation tasks. fine. Hence the desire to create a machine that can take advantage of the best of both worlds.

To achieve balance on the ground and agility in the air, LEO had to be carefully designed. Kyunam Kim, Soon-Jo Chung, Elena-Sorina Lupu and Patrick Spieler explained in a e-mail that this required robust but lightweight components, as well as algorithms to control LEO’s four propellers and leg joints “synchronously to ensure LEO walks or flies without losing balance”. The two disparate areas “are generally not intertwined in existing robotic systems, and we have had to tackle a rich set of engineering problems that have not been well studied in other robotic systems,” they said. added. A search paper describing this work was published today in Science Robotics.

LEO weighs only 5.7 pounds (2.58 kg) and is 2.5 feet (75 cm) tall high. Like a bird, the robot uses its thin, multi-articulated legs to push off the ground and provide assistance during takeoff. LEO’s inclined electric thrusters, the four propellers, are synchronized with these jumps. LEO walks like on high heels, but these heels allow a balanced standing position; if conditions warrant, however, LEO’s propellers could still kick in to provide additional stability. The batteries, sensors and required processing power are integrated into the robot’s torso, allowing full runtime and no messy wires.

“We find that optimizing LEO’s energy consumption was not a priority in this work,” the team explained in its email. “Instead, we focused on a wide range of capabilities.”

During the tests, LEO went back and forth between agile walking and flight, which he did to avoid difficult obstacles and to perform difficult tasks in which balance was required, including skateboarding and walking on a slackline. The design of LEO enabled “dynamic bipedal walking with complex ground interaction, while preserving the flight performance of a multi-rotor vehicle,” as the team wrote in their email. The team claim that LEO is the first bipedal robot to perform slacklining, albeit with the help of its propellers.

With the combined power of walking and flying, the team hopes to enable a wide range of robotic missions, such asinspection of tension lines and surveillance of large bridges. These robots could inspect aging infrastructure, work in disaster scenarios, and even explore distant worlds.

In an Associate Focus article, Stefano Mintchev, a researcher in the Department of Environmental Systems Sciences at ETH Zurich, said that LEO’s capabilities require trade-offs:

The propellers are tilted to be more effective in stabilizing LEO’s gait, but this choice reduces their effectiveness in flight. To minimize the weight that needs to be lifted, the legs are thin and malnourished. LEO needs constant propeller support while walking, which makes it more power hungry than a purely terrestrial robot …[The] The extent of these compromises, and therefore the proximity of a multimodal robot to a purely terrestrial or aerial robot, depends on the design choices. Minimizing trade-offs remains a big challenge.

Mintchev, who was not involved in the new study, offered his advice to the team, saying they should continue to draw inspiration from nature. He pointed to the flying snakes, which flatten their bodies to improve their glide.

For sure there is room for improvement, but LEO is the first in a whole new breed of robot. With Astro boy being a key source of inspiration, these scientists still have a long way to go.

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