What flies like a bumble bee, balances like a meerkat, and tumbles like a gymnast? If you guessed any living creature, you should know this mystery thing is also made of carbon fiber and wheels.
It’s not a transformer, but rather the Multi-Modal Mobility Morphobot (M4): a new machine inspired by various members of the animal kingdom. But whereas most animals only have one or two tricks up their sleeves, M4 has several. In addition to flying and tumbling, it can reconfigure its limbs to roll, crawl, and crouch, giving it mastery over both land and sky. It can even grasp and manipulate objects.
Constructing such a versatile machine was no easy feat. The extra parts needed to give a robot enough power to travel over bumpy obstacles typically weigh it down too much for flight. But unlike previous bots, M4 doesn’t rely on separate mechanical parts for each type of movement. Instead, each of its four limbs has two joints and a propeller that can act as either a wheel or a thruster that provides a burst of force. Altogether, the entire body adds up to a mere 6 kilograms, about the weight of a can of paint, the team reports today in Nature Communications.
Researchers say M4’s wide array of abilities—which can be deployed both remotely and autonomously—could one day give it a leg up in missions with unknown or haphazard terrains, such as search and rescue operations.
