Image: LIS

We’ve all watched with muted disgust as a lumbering airborne insect, a mosquito eater, maybe, or a giant moth, rams itself repeatedly into the window from outside. And it just keeps on coming. We’ve listened to that quiet, unholy buzz as its wings flutter and scrape against the glass.

And yet they stay airborne. For the next wave of drone designers, that’s the important part. 

The Laboratory of Intelligent Systems has designed an insect-like drone that can do much the same, without any complex technological advancements. Most drones today fall out of the sky if they make contact with a wall or another surface, but not the GimBall. LIS explains over at RoboHub:

[W]e think that flying robots should be able to physically interact with their surroundings. Take insects: they often collide with obstacles and continue flying afterwards. We thus designed GimBall, a flying robot that can collide with objects seamlessly. Thanks to a passively rotating spherical cage, it remains stable even after taking hits from all sides. This approach enables GimBall to fly in the most difficult places without complex sensors.

This will be useful in plenty of the more benign operations inventors are hoping to use drones for: food and supply delivery, mapping hard-to-reach terrain, and disaster relief. It may also, of course, prove useful to the military, as a combat drone that doesn’t fall out of the sky after a crash might mean more versatile war-bots.

Right now, Predators soar high above the battlefield, dropping Hellfire missiles from on high. Tomorrow, with thicker skins and collision resistance, war drones might be bouncing around the trenches, too.