Bioinspired robotics: The future of robots that can walk, fly, swim and climb
SMRTR summary
A dragonfly can fly, crawl, and skim across water without a second thought. Now, engineers want to build robots that can do the same.
Researchers at Beihang University, Dalian University of Technology, and EPFL have published a sweeping review of so-called multimodal robots, machines capable of switching between walking, flying, swimming, or climbing on a single platform.
The goal isn't simply to pile on movement options. It's about real-world performance in unpredictable environments, think search-and-rescue missions that begin in the air and end underwater.
The engineering hurdles are significant. Extra movement modes mean extra weight, and components useful in one environment can become dead weight in another. Body morphing, the ability to physically reconfigure mid-task, remains especially difficult.
To bring some order to the field, the researchers propose five standardized performance metrics to evaluate these systems.
Looking ahead, they argue that tighter integration of adaptive hardware with AI-driven control could one day produce robots that don't just match animals in versatility, but surpass them.
SMRTR provides this summary for quick context. The original article belongs to Interesting Engineering.
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