Vampire Bat Inspired Robot Can Fly and Walk

The Deployable Air-Land Exploration Robot (DALER). Screengrab via Ludovic Daler/YouTube

Using Vampire Bats (Desmodus rotundus) for inspiration, a team from LIS, EPFL and NCCR Robotics have developed a new kind of flying robot that can also walk crawl.

Called the DALER (Deployable Air-Land Exploration Robot), the robot has foldable wings covered with a soft fabric that can be used both as wings and as legs.

The DALER has been designed for use in search and rescue operations, where it would fly long distances to survey large spaces, and then be able walk into dangerous or inaccessible areas. It could be be remotely deployed to fly to a dangerous area, and then walk through a disaster zone (e.g. a damaged building) to find victims.

In order to design the robot, the team had to first designate the primary mode of locomotion – in this case flight, as the DALER will cover the longest distances this way. With this in mind, a method of using the wings also for walking was devised in a way that does not give extra weight. The resulting wing is equipped with wingerons on the tip which rotate to allow the robot to “walk” when it is on the ground.

One of the main issues the team ran into was that a flying robot, with its large wings, is unable to easily navigate in small areas. By observing Vampire Bats, the team developed a foldable actuator that allows the wings to fold into a smaller space.

Then in tweaking the distance between the centre of mass of the robot and the axis of rotation of the “legs” the team was able to maximize the energy efficiency of each unique type of movement and allow the DALER to reach speeds of 20m/s (44 mph) in the air and 6cm/s (0.13 mph) on the ground.

Future development of the DALER will include the possibility to hover and to take off autonomously from the ground to allow the robot to return to the air and come back to base after the mission.