DALER: A drone that's capable of flying and crawling on the ground

Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology have been doing some remarkable work when it comes to innovation in flying robots.

This time from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), researchers at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems have come up with an innovative concept of a flying platform that can not only fly but even crawl on the ground. The backronym 'DALER' stands for "Deployable Air Land Exploration Robot". Its actually named after the man behind the Project 'Ludovic Daler' a Ph.D candidate.

The project goes by the title 'Adaptive Morphology for Multi-Modal Locomotion' and is aimed at developing robots capable of multiple modes of locomotion. For task such as exploration, search-and-rescue, or monitoring of the environment autonomous or remotely operated robots are the obvious choice. But for these kind of tasks robots may have to deal with complex terrains, such as semi-collapsed buildings, deep caverns, or forests with a lot of vegetation. In general, flying robots are considered  most capable for the purpose. However for exploring areas close to the ground it is found that ground locomotion is more efficient than flying. Hence a robot with both capabilities is suited for the purpose.

DARPA's Cheetah Robot and the LS3 taking quadruped robot tech to new highs

DARPA in collaboration with Boston Dynamics has been brewing up some really awesome legged robot technology over the past few years. The various legged robot projects have been under constant update and improvement over the years. The list of the state of the art legged robots from Boston Dynamics includes the The Big Dog, Cheetah, Petman and the latest of the pack, the LS3. Each robots have been designed for a own unique purpose and have significant differences.

The latest updates however are from the Cheetah and the LS3.

The Cheetah

The Cheetah has been under development since 1989 under MIT and later under Boston Dynamics. It has been developed and funded under DARPA's Maximum Mobility and Manipulation (M3) program. A recent video update on YouTube shows The Cheetah running at 28.3 mph (45.5 km/h), breaking it previous record of 27.78 mph (44.7 km/h) which it achieved back in 2009. This makes it 0.5 mph faster than Usain Bolt.

Now that being said, The Cheetah has a lot of advantages over Usain Bolt, It runs on a high speed treadmill; plus, it is powered by an off board hydraulic pump and uses a boom-like device to keep it running in the center of the treadmill. Overall, significant improvements for the speeds have been made in the algorithms and a more powerful pump have been added. Although Boston Dynamics plans to test a free running Cheetah in the open environment by next year.

Not much details about the technology have been made public.

HECTOR: Insect Inspired Hexapod Robot

Understanding nature has always been one of the inspirations for development of Robots and automated technology. When it comes to legged robots, developers are always in the process to make Robots move as elegantly as animals to unravel the secret of nature, when it comes to movements in animals. Biologists and engineers at the Bielefeld Center of Excellence 'Cognitive Interaction Technology' (CITEC) are just trying to do that. They developed the hexapod walking robot 'HECTOR' for this purpose.

Robot that works on biomass eats and poos like an organism

Robots in general require batteries and have a limited run time this limits their ability to work autonomously. The only solution to this problem is to make use of available energy resources like solar energy, that too has its own limitations. But what if I say we already have Robots that create their energy by eating stuff and poo too.. Yeah you heard it right. 

A team of researchers, professors and scientists from the Bristol Robotics Laboratory in the UK  have created what is called the EcoBot III (Eco-bot 3). The Eco-bot 3 is the latest version of robot which works by creating energy from biomass.Ecobot III, contains a fully functional digestive system capable of ingesting biomass, turning it into energy, and then excreting waste. Ecobot is also called "The  BREADbot" (Bio-Regulation and Energy-Autonomy with Digestion), the earlier version the EcoBot 1 and EcoBot 2 worked by relying on sugar and flies diet respectively.

How does EcoBot III work?  

Ecobot III basically works by converting sewage (biomass) into energy with the help of what is called Microbial Fuel Cell technology (MFC). It is a kind of Fuel Cell which basically mimics real digestion. It makes use of complex chemical reactions which generate hydrogen, this hydrogen provides electrons to generate the electric current which powers the robot, while hydrogen ions are sent to a separate chamber where they mix with oxygen to create water. The robot is powered by a stack of 48 such Microbial Fuel Cell.

The robot excretes out the waste biomass  At the end of a complete cycle (approximately after 24 hours) a peristaltic pump evacuates the waste that has accumulated in the bottom of the conical artificial stomach.