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Researchers have developed a new kind of robot. It can't write our theme music. Only BJ Leiderman does that. But it can swim, run and even, one day, it might clean our coastlines. NPR's Ari Daniel met up with one of its inventors.
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ARI DANIEL, BYLINE: Hi.
RAPHAEL ZUFFEREY: Hey.
DANIEL: Good to meet you.
Raphael Zufferey ushers me into his lab at MIT. A giant tank is filled with bright turquoise water. There are small flying robots perched everywhere I look. One's flapping its wings.
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DANIEL: These devices are inspired by diving seabirds like the Atlantic puffin, which uses its wings to both fly and swim.
ZUFFEREY: These puffins solve this really challenging task of moving in air, in water despite the huge difference in density.
DANIEL: Zufferey, who's a mechanical engineer, wanted to see if he could build a bird-sized robot that could also move through both mediums and between them. No one had ever done that before.
ZUFFEREY: A wing that could operate in both those fluids somewhat efficiently seems implausible.
DANIEL: Zufferey and his colleagues based the robot's overall body plan on a diving bird but made a couple key departures, including no legs.
ZUFFEREY: Can we go from the water straight to the air simply with the wings themselves?
DANIEL: Is this the robot here?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Yeah.
ZUFFEREY: So this is the design that we came up with.
DANIEL: It's really elegant. The central body, which houses the motor, battery and electronics, is completely open.
I see the guts of this thing.
ZUFFEREY: So water floods the whole system here. You have to waterproof individually every single component.
DANIEL: The wings are made from a translucent nylon fabric reinforced with carbon fiber struts. The wingspan's not quite 3 feet tip to tip. It's got a tail to help it fly, and the whole package weighs about half a pound.
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DANIEL: On a slightly different model, Zufferey shows me how crisply and quickly the wings can flap.
You've really got to hold on to that.
ZUFFEREY: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, you can really feel the forces.
DANIEL: The robot flaps five to six times a second to maintain flight. But to leave the water and enter the air, it's got to move its wings 10 times a second.
ZUFFEREY: We need to reach the highest speed possible as we approach the water surface. And then we need to lift the robot out, and there, it'll require a huge amount of thrust.
DANIEL: A lot of power.
ZUFFEREY: A lot of power.
DANIEL: So much power that most diving birds are unable to generate it, which is why they take off by using their legs to run along the water's surface. Zufferey calls up a video he and his colleagues filmed at Lake Geneva in Switzerland. There's a ripple at the surface. Then the robot bursts out of the water and into the air in less than a second. It sounds like - honestly, a lot like a bird taking flight.
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DANIEL: The research describing the engineering of the robot is published in the journal Science.
GLENNA CLIFTON: This is a beautiful robot. It is light and powerful and a monumental step in the performance at both swimming, flying and transitioning between the two.
DANIEL: Glenna Clifton is an animal movement biologist at the University of Portland in Oregon who wasn't involved in the research. Clifton says the robot shows what makes the flight biology of diving birds unique. And she's excited about possible applications, like observing the coastal ocean and monitoring something like a remote coral reef.
CLIFTON: This robot could be deployed to fly efficiently towards where the coral reef is and then dive under the water to get a better view.
DANIEL: These are the sorts of applications that Raphael Zufferey back at MIT plans to enable by equipping the robot with a handful of onboard sensors. He and his team are continuing to refine and improve their aerial aquatic robots, honed by experimentation but still inspired by the natural world.
ZUFFEREY: You see that it has already been done in biology - right? - so that it gives you hope.
DANIEL: Ari Daniel, NPR News, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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