Picobug – Mesoscale Robot that can Run, Fly, and Grasp

The Vijay Kumar Lab at Penn Engineering just published this video of one of its current research projects.

In this paper they present the flying monkey, a novel robot platform having three main capabilities: walking, grasping, and flight. This new robotic platform merges one of the world’s smallest quadrotor aircraft with a lightweight, single-degree-of-freedom walking mechanism and an SMA-actuated gripper to enable all three functions in a 30g package.

The main goal and key contribution of this paper is to design and prototype the flying monkey that has increased mission life and capabilities through the combination of the functionalities of legged and aerial robots.

Source: YouTube

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