Researchers have built a rescue robot that looks like a vampire bat but can fly and walk.

The new robot was designed by a team of researchers from the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland led by Ludovic Daler. It's called the Deployable Air-Land Exploration Robot or DALER.

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The robot drone has a pair of retractable wings that let it soar through the air but also permits it to walk like a bat on the ground.

In tests, DALER reached speeds of 20 meters per second in the air and 6 centimeters per second while walking.

Flying DALER, commanding it to land, and then have it search through debris fields in search of survivors could be just one of the many ways a walking/flying drone could be used.

It's primarily intended as a tool for search and rescue. The robot can conduct aerial surveillance of the site of a natural disaster and then land and explore individual buildings.

It can also fly into a nuclear power plant and explore pipes and passageways as it searches for the source of a problem.

DALER isn't the first robot with a design that has been inspired by animals. Previous drones were patterned after the physique, ingenuity and unique capabilities of cheetah or snakes, making their robots a fusion of natural wonder and technological innovation.

The robot's design is inspired by the common vampire bat Desmodus rotundus, which can perform aerial and terrestrial locomotion with limited trade-offs. The wings' adaptive morphology allows the robot to modify the shape of its body to increase its efficiency during terrestrial locomotion.

Details of new drone were published in Bioinspiration and Biometrics.

Tagsdrones, bat like robot, SRO, DALER