Unmanned aerial vehicles and have come of age. They are everywhere where humans want support; mapping habitats, monitoring and tracking animal movements, helping through wildfires, or even rescuing people out of calamities. Electric variants of these aircrafts are enhancing their performance limited by short battery life earlier. While these robot flyers offer flexibility as to where they can take off and land, they still need some sort of stable ground to get them airborne. In case of some drones, even human intervention to get them flying.
By giving legs inspired by bird’s limbs to a robot capable of flying, researches have made a drone that can walk, hop, and even leap into flight like a real bird. Now, that’s how you increase the operational range of a drone. The feat is made possible by researchers from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland.
Designer: /
The aerial drone, inspired by the convenience with which a bird can get from land to air – irrelevant of the surface – is developed in collaboration with UC Irvine. A replacement option for fixed-wing aircrafts, the drone is called Robotic Avian-inspired Vehicle for multiple ENvironments (RAVEN) and comes with bird-inspired articulated legs permitting it hop over debris while rescuing humans, to walk out of danger when fighting fire, and to leap into air from over a tree branch while monitoring the pride of lions below.
The name is not random. It is reported that to add bird-like capability to the limitations of the fixed-wing drones, the researchers actually took inspiration from birds such as ravens and crows. The RAVEN has 100cm wingspan in full flight. It can walk at a pace of 1m per 4 seconds and hop some 12cms. The strength in the robot’s legs is made possible with a combination of springs and motors that mimic a bird’s muscles and tendons to create the needed suppleness and elasticity of the legs.
Interestingly, with the bird-like abilities, the operational possibilities of such a drone open up instantly. It can walk on rough terrains, jump over obstacles and even leap into flight without a proper runway. When airborne it is designed to consume less power and also land more elegantly without the risk of unexpected crashing and wrong landing. If this meets the light of day it could be the exploration aircraft for areas dangerous for humans to venture and unreachable for fixed-wing drones.
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