Scientists have built a bird-inspired robot with legs that can walk on the ground, hop over obstacles and jump into flight, an advance that may lead to the development of drones for complex terrains.

EPFL’s RAVEN is a fixed-wing drone that can take off without a runway using bird-inspired legs. EPFL’s RAVEN is a fixed-wing drone that can take off without a runway using bird-inspired legs.

The key challenge in attaching legs to drones was that they significantly increased mass and complexity. State-of-the-art robotic legs were designed for robots walking on the ground and were too ...

Based on this reasoning, a team of researchers set out to give flying drones their own bird-inspired legs, with their findings published in Nature (preprint on ArXiv). The prototype RAVEN (Robotic ...

They're just hard to launch and land. A team of Swiss researchers has devised a possible solution by slapping some legs on a drone known as the RAVEN. This new drone takes its inspiration from ...

Their Robotic Avian-inspired Vehicle for multiple ENvironments (RAVEN) trades traditional landing gear for a pair of bird-inspired articulated legs that allow the drone to walk around, hop over ...

Scientists have built a bird-inspired robot with legs that can walk on the ground, hop over obstacles and jump into flight, an advance that may lead to the development of drones for complex terrains.