It can be used to explore disaster areas by blundering its way through ruins

Oct 31, 2013 07:50 GMT  ·  By

We've seen plenty of flying drones, but most of them at least tried to incorporate some sort of spacial awareness technology, instead of making it a point to bump into as many things as possible.

The folks at EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne), however, went the completely opposite route when they made the GimBall.

Basically, they exchanged expensive sophistication for cheap rebuild costs, and even forewent any sort of intelligent navigation.

The result was a wiry sphere, of sorts, which imitates, to an extent, the way a house fly drives headfirst into a window until it finds a way outside. Or drunk peoples' regular way of travel.

You can see it in the video below in action. GimBall is, in essence, a flying robot with an outer harness that prevents damage to the core device, and helps guide it around obstacles.

Its purpose? To randomly explore disaster areas where no man has gone before. After all, it doesn't matter what pattern is used, if any, in the exploration of an area, as long as the area gets mapped out eventually.

Not to say that there's nothing noteworthy about the robot. After all, the outer cage protects the bot itself quite well, and the drone does have a self-righting propeller and motor.

More importantly, no one will weep if the thing suffers an unfortunate fate, because it's cheap to make, replace and repair. That was really the whole point of the research and development project.

Finally, since GimBall isn't much bigger than a human head, it should be able to navigate through even the most cluttered environments.

And with Wi-Fi technology and 3G as advanced as they are today, even the smallest wireless sensor and receiver will be enough to allow a central system to track the robot and generate a map based on the findings of whatever camera is installed on the drone.