LEO the robot can float like a butterfly and balance on a beam

Meet LEO: a robot that can walk on two legs, fly, hop, skateboard, and even slackline. This mix between a drone and a traditional robot was developed by a team at Caltech's Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies, and its creators claim that LEO is the first robot with both multi-joint legs and propeller-based thrusters--which helps it fly and allows it to achieve a high degree of balance control. They further detailed LEO's range of capabilities and potentials in a new paper published this week in Science Robotics. Caltech engineers modeled the design for LEO, which is short for LEONARDO (LEgs ONboARD drOne), after birds, which can move about and maneuver through a variety of environments with relative ease. "Think about the way birds are able to flap and hop to navigate telephone lines," Soon-Jo Chung, the corresponding author on the paper and a professor at Caltech, said in a press release. "A complex yet intriguing behavior happens as birds move between walking and flying."