Drilling, grinding, and setting anchors on vertical walls are fundamental processes in everyday construction work. Manually doing these works is error-prone, potentially dangerous, and elaborate at height. Today, heavy mobile ground robots can perform automatic power tool work. However, aerial vehicles could be deployed in untraversable environments and reach inaccessible places. Existing drone designs do not provide the large forces, payload, and high precision required for using power tools. This work presents the first aerial robot design to perform versatile manipulation tasks on vertical concrete walls with continuous forces of up to 150 N. The platform combines a quadrotor with active suction cups for perching on walls and a lightweight, tiltable linear tool table. This combination minimizes weight using the propulsion system for flying, surface alignment, and feed during manipulation and allows precise positioning of the power tool. We evaluate our design in a concrete drilling application - a challenging construction process that requires high forces, accuracy, and precision. In 30 trials, our design can accurately pinpoint a target position despite perching imprecision. Nine visually guided drilling experiments demonstrate a drilling precision of 6 mm without further automation. Aside from drilling, we also demonstrate the versatility of the design by setting an anchor into concrete.

Last week, researchers of the University of Sherbrooke presented the Sherbrook Multimodal Autonomous Drone (S-MAD) at the Living Machine 2017 conference at Stanford University, where it won the "Best Robotics Paper Award." According to NewAtlas, the Createk Design Lab and Sherbrooke researchers looked to birds and their last-minute perching instincts and abilities and infused those into their unmanned aerial vehicle. Not only that, but the company went with a fixed-wing approach--again, hewing closer to a bird's anatomy as opposed to the typical rotor-based drone design. Makes sense, as the Living Machine conference is all about the symbiotic relationship between nature and machinery, rewarding those companies most creative and effective in their designs. The Sherbrooke researchers apparently tested thousands of aerodynamic model simulations in order to perfect the design's flight and perching capabilities, before actually succeeding in developing a capable fixed-wing drone with the proper thrust and pitch required to pull the aforementioned behavior off correctly.

A robot with sticky feet that can climb up and down vertical walls as well as across the ceiling has been created by scientists. Harvard University engineers and Rolls-Royce partnered to make the robot which they say could inspect complex machines in the future. The device could be used in future to identify and maintain jet engines, scientific instruments and even generators. Jet engines can have up to 25,000 individual parts, making regular maintenance a tedious task that can take over a month per engine. Many components are located deep inside the engine and cannot be inspected without taking the machine apart, adding time and costs to maintenance.

Cockroaches don't swerve when they see a wall - they crash into it. The force from the collision is used by the clever insects to launch themselves up vertical surfaces. Now, scientists have taken inspiration from the humble cockroach to create a terrifying robot that can climb up walls. 'Cockroaches running at over 1 metre (3.28 feet) or 50 body lengths per second transition from the floor to a vertical wall within 75 milliseconds by using their head like a car bumper, mechanically mediating the manoeuvre,' researchers at the University of California, Berkeley wrote in their study published today. Inspired by this cockroach movement, the researchers developed their own model robotic cockroaches.