This Hard-to-Destroy Drone Goes From Rigid to Flexible When It Crashes

Anyone who's ever flown a drone of any sort will tell you that sooner or later, you're going to crash it. The question is how exactly you will go about doing this, and how much of the drone will be functional after it's happened. Most flying animals somewhat frustratingly don't have this problem: Birds and insects run into things occasionally (or all the time, for small bugs), and just shrug it off and keep on going, thanks to their biological design, which includes both stiffness and flexibility. Now roboticists at the EPFL, in Lausanne, Switzerland, are relying on these same qualities to design a highly resilient quadrotor that's impressively difficult to destroy. There are three primary strategies for designing drones with impact resistance.