Inspired by Insects, the Gimball Flying Robot is a Smash, Literally [VIDEO]

Flying insects smashing into trees and rebounding unfazed were what inspired a team of Swiss robotics engineers to design their latest creation, the Gimball, a crash-happy flying robot that bumps into and ricochets off obstacles rather than avoiding them.

What the Gimball lacks in obstacle avoidance software, it makes up for in lightweight design and durability. A recent demonstration of the Gimball took place in a forest near Lausanne, Switzerland, where the researchers programmed it to fly toward a point of coordinates and let it loose without any other instructions.

Like an insect bumbling though the trees, the Gimball made its way through the woods, smacking into trees and promptly realigning itself as it continued on its course.

The actual flying mechanism is powered by two propellers and and steered by fins, but the apparatus is housed within a gyroscope, which keeps the robot upright and stable. The whole system, which weighs less than 400 grams, is caged within a lightweight carbon fiber frame that takes the bulk of the impact when the robot smacks into an obstacle.

"The idea was for the robot's body to stay balanced after a collision, so that it can keep to its trajectory," said Adrien Briod, a PhD candidate at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EFPL). "Its predecessors, which weren't stabilized, tended to take off in random directions after impact."

Briod, who developed the Gimball with his colleague Przemyslaw Mariusz Kornatowski, said the complex system of sensors most robots use to navigate is inconvenient.

"The sensors are heavy and fragile. And they can't operate in certain conditions, for example if the environment is full of smoke," he said, adding that the robustness of the Gimball comes from its simplicity.

"Flying insects handle collisions quite well. For them, shocks aren't really accidents, because they're designed to bounce back from them. This is the direction we decided to take in our research."

While the forest flight test was considered a success and the designers intend to show the Gimball to the public at the IREX conference in Tokyo from November 5-9, Briod said the Gimball still need more work.

"We're not yet ready to compete with our model," he said. "Insects are still superior."