The engineers over at the Illinois Institute of Technology haven't failed to impress us with their new Hybrid Terrestrial and Aerial Quadrotor robot HyTAQ. Designed by Arash Kalantari and Matthew Spenko, this innovative mobile robot does terrestrial and aerial locomotion with equal grace. While traveling on the Earth, HyTAQ needs to budge the rolling resistance while consuming very less power, thereby having larger operation time and scoring one notch higher than the other quadrotors and rotorcrafts. They have done various experiments with it, only to find that the robot is capable of moving 4x greater distances. The wonderful part is that of 'obstacle avoidance'. When HyTAQ sees an obstacle, it simply flies over it.


Once in the flight mode, the quadrotor's configuration is made such that its four actuators provide the required thrust. Also, the duo made it possible to use the same actuator set and control system for terrestrial locomotion by adding a rolling cage to the quadrotor. Trust me, you will be glad you saw this video -