The GRASP laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania is one of the world’s foremost reserach and development centers for helicopter drones. Led by Professor Vijay Kumar, the lab’s team has pioneered, among others, the design of bio-inspired flying robots with collective behavior. Their latest breakthrough is super-stable pico-drone capable of in-flight self-righting, designed by Yash Mulgaonkar. The carbon-fiber composite exoskeleton of the miniature robot was inspired by the Gömböc shape. Although the Gömböc shape is very sensitive and in case of a homogeneous body deviations of 1/100 millimeter may destroy its mechanical properties, the shape itself is a good starting point for any kind of self-righting mechanism. If the material distribution is not homogeneous (as in the case of the Kumar-Mulgaonkar robot) then even an approximate Gömböc shape can guarantee the self-righting behavior. The GRASP pico-robot has the unique property that it can spontaneously recover from mide-air collisions with other robots and collisions with walls. The Penn scientitsts are already working on its larger variant. The reserach was reported not only on the webpage of the IEEE society butr also in the press.
Link to video about the Gömböc-shaped drones:
TED-x video about more drone types (where Gömböc-shaped robots appear between 4:40 and 6:10):
Study about the Gömböc-shaped drones: