Tech News
← Back to articles

Video Friday: This Drone Drives and Flies—Seamlessly

read original related products more articles

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

ICRA 2026: 1–5 June 2026, VIENNA

Enjoy today’s videos!

Unlike existing hybrid designs, Duawlfin eliminates the need for additional actuators or propeller-driven ground propulsion by leveraging only its standard quadrotor motors and introducing a differential drivetrain with one-way bearings. The seamless transitions between aerial and ground modes further underscore the practicality and effectiveness of our approach for applications like urban logistics and indoor navigation.

[ HiPeR Lab ]

I appreciate the softness of NEO’s design, but those fingers look awfully fragile.

[ 1X ]

Imagine reaching into your backpack to find your keys. Your eyes guide your hand to the opening, but once inside, you rely almost entirely on touch to distinguish your keys from your wallet, phone, and other items. This seamless transition between sensory modalities (knowing when to rely on vision versus touch) is something humans do effortlessly but robots struggle with. The challenge isn’t just about having multiple sensors. Modern robots are equipped with cameras, tactile sensors, depth sensors, and more. The real problem is **how to integrate these different sensory streams**, especially when some sensors provide sparse but critical information at key moments. Our solution comes from rethinking how we combine modalities. Instead of forcing all sensors through a single network, we train separate expert policies for each modality and learn how to combine their action predictions at the policy level.

Multi-university Collaboration presented via [ GitHub ]

Thanks, Haonan!

... continue reading