A Robot That Walks, Swims And Flies!

The engineers at the Illinois Institute of Technology have designed a robot, which can walk on earth, swim in the water and fly in the sky. HyTAQ, as it is fondly known as, is a Hybrid Terrestrial and Aerial Quadrotor robot. The robot  when it walks, it needs to budge rolling resistance. But it consumes less power in this motion, which increases its operation time and makes it a better choice as compared to the existing quadrotors and rotorcrafts. The best part of the robot is its ‘obstacle avoidance’ capability. As soon as it finds an obstacle in its way, it just flies to overcome it. Once the robot enters the flight mode, its configuration changes in a way that its four actuators provide the desired thrust. The designers have designed the robot in such a way that it can use the same actuator set and control system for terrestrial locomotion as well just by adding a rolling cage to the quadrotor.