It can crawl in addition to being capable of flight

Jan 26, 2015 15:02 GMT  ·  By

Flying drones have reached a point where they can be quite nimble in the air, with the occasional mishap when they mistake a garage door for “up,” but ultimately they can't do much before and after they get off the ground.

The Deployable Air-Land Exploration Robot, or DALER for short, aims to put a stop to that trend, or at least break free of it even if no one else does.

Invented by researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), the unmanned aerial drone can both fly and crawl. The design is based on that of a bat. A vampire bat, not a baseball bat or what have you.

The DALER drone

Robots that fly using moving wings, like birds, are not nearly as popular as airplane-like UAVs, but they do have their advantages.

Provided the wings are balanced well enough, and they reproduce the natural motions of whatever animal they are based on, they can provide a wider range of motion, even stationary liftoff normally reserved to propeller-based craft, like quadcopters.

The DALER successfully imitates bats, even though it doesn't quite look the part. Not perfectly. Still, it solves the biggest problems of terrestrial navigation.

Normally, wing-equipped drones can't ambulate over ground due to the different center of mass requirements in flight and walking.

The DALER solves the issue thanks to the deformable and retractable wing morphology. In regular terms, it can fold its wings closer to the main body, thus allowing it to crawl on the ground without inevitably tipping forward or sideways and being left a helpless hunk of metal in the dirt.

Being able to reduce its wing span also means it will be less likely to bump into things, or get snagged on something or other. It is true that the DALER mostly only moves its wing tips, but the principle remains the same.

The wings are covered in soft fabric. When on the ground, they fold into a compact form and use their hinges to turn in place.

The speed isn't great, only 6 cm / 2.5 inches, but at least it can move at all. Air speed is of 70 Kph / 45 Mph by the way.

Practical applications

Search and rescue is the main one brought up by the inventors at EPFL. The drone could fly to an unstable area, land and look around to find victims (provided it was outfitted with necessary scanning equipment). Meanwhile, human teams can concentrate on whatever large amounts of people need guidance away to more open, safer areas.

In the future, the drone will be able to autonomously take off, allowing it to return to its send-off point after a mission or when energy stores start to run low.