LEONARDO (short for LEgs ONboARD drOne, or LEO for short) can walk a tightrope like tightrope walkers, jump, and even skateboard.
Developed by a team at Caltech’s Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies (CAST), LEO is the first robot to use multi-jointed legs and propeller-based thrusters to achieve a good degree of control over its balance. You can see it below .
Hybrid robot
LEO stands 76 centimeters tall and equipped with two legs that have three actuated joints, along with four propeller thrusters mounted at an angle on the robot’s shoulders.
As Kyunam Kim , a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech and co-lead author of the Science Robotics paper, explains:
Robots with a multimodal locomotion capability can move through challenging environments more efficiently than traditional robots by appropriately switching between their available means of motion. In particular, LEO aims to bridge the gap between the two disparate domains of aerial and bipedal locomotion that are typically not intertwined in existing robotic systems.