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CalTech’s Jaunty LEO Robot Combines Walking and Flying for a New Type of Locomotion

If there’s a consensus for how robots should locomote, it’s that they either move over the ground on wheels or legs (or combinations of such), or they float and fly. Researchers at CalTech, however, decided to create this jaunty little hybrid called LEO:

The LEO robot stands just 2.5 feet tall. It’s cute for sure, but all I could think was, why does it walk at all as opposed to being purely a flying robot? Unless you are using it specifically to transport skateboards as in the video, I couldn’t see the value.

But CalTech’s researchers point out that this is, well, research. It’s experimentation for the sake of it, in search of a potential application. “We drew inspiration from nature. Think about the way birds are able to flap and hop to navigate telephone lines,” says researcher Soon-Jo Chung, Bren Professor of Aerospace and Control and Dynamical Systems. “A complex yet intriguing behavior happens as birds move between walking and flying. We wanted to understand and learn from that.”

“By using a hybrid movement that is somewhere between walking and flying, the researchers get the best of both worlds in terms of locomotion,” the researchers write. “LEO’s lightweight legs take stress off of its thrusters by supporting the bulk of the weight, but because the thrusters are controlled synchronously with leg joints, LEO has uncanny balance.”

As for what the future applications could be, the research team is thinking of adaptive landing gear systems, not just for robots on Earth, but for rotorcraft on Mars. Being able to stick the landing on tricky terrain, particularly when you’re 200 million miles from help, would be a boon for NASA.