By Evan Ackerman

A few years ago, Ludovic Daler showed us a flying robot that he was working on that had the ability to “walk” by rotating its wings while on the ground. We love seeing designs like this that are completely, utterly out of the box, and Ludovic promised even more:

We aim to make adaptive deployable wings… their shape could be adaptively modified to augment efficiency of forward flight, hover flight, and displacement on the ground.

With a little bit of inspiration from the common vampire bat (!), Ludovic has delivered with this updated robot that keeps its walking ability and now includes a foldable skeleton mechanism that lets it deploy and retract its wings.  ….[Read more]