This is a robot that walks, flies, skateboards, and slacklines.

But why?

A portion of this video was sponsored by Bluehost.

More about them at the end of the show.

There are lots of bipedal robots out there, and drones are ubiquitous.

But until now, no one had engineered walking and flying technology to work together in a single robot.

- So it's the first robot that truly integrates the walking and the flying.

It's not just a drone with legs.

- [Dr. Chung] It's LEONARDO and it stands for LEgs ONboARD drOne. So I think it's a pretty good name.

- [Derek] Why is this potentially useful?

- Yeah, so any flying vehicles actually have to start from the ground to take off.

And eventually, they can not stay in the air forever. They have to eventually come down.

But sometimes they have to come down on the very challenging terrain or some obstacles.

So it's actually a good idea to have these controllable legs.

So they can actually land in a very interesting configuration, or posture, or orientation.

- [Derek] But there are additional benefits.

A robot like this is more stable than a regular drone.

- I view these propellers almost like arms.

So some people might say that, oh, you guys are cheating because I mean, bipedal robots do not have propellers,

but we are essentially using the propellers to do additional stabilization.

(robot whirring)

So basically, you generate the lift or thruster force to cancel some of the the weight of the robot, but that's really a secondary factor.

The most important thing is basically posture or orientation, stabilization.

(robot whirring)

- [Derek] That is so cool to see.

- So the main facility for this lab is this one.

It's a gigantic fan array.

- [Derek] I can see all the fans now.

- [Dr. Chung] Yeah, we have - you can start counting, but 1,296 computer fans.

Those are really literally computer fans.

- [Derek] How fast can it generate wind?

- So up to 15 meters per second or 20 meters per second.

- [Derek] It's like a wind tunnel without the need for a tunnel.

- Yes.

- It might mess with our audio or with our microphones.

Whoa.

- The idea of the smoke machines is to actually visualize the flow, but also with all these additional sensors, like infrared cameras or radar and LIDAR, how we can actually figure out the kind of location or environment around your vehicle in the presence of this fog.

- [Derek] I wanted to feel their power for myself.

- [Man] All right, you ready?

- [Derek] Yeah, let's do it.

(machine whirring loudly)

Yeah!

That was so cool.

I love it.

They use this facility to test Leonardo to see how stable he is even in different wind conditions.

(orchestral music)

- And we showed that Leo is more robust than a drone because a drone gets blown away by the wind.

But then Leo does not because of its ground contact.

So for example, if you go hiking and there's like, suddenly a lot of wind, you're not gonna fall because you have the ground contact.

But for a drone, it might be blown away.

(gentle soft orchestra music)

(robot whirring)

- [Man] Oh no.

- So we actually took one of the whiteboards that we have at home and we put oil.

So we applied perturbations to Leo, and what's happening is as you push Leo, instead of falling, it stays upright, but it also slides on the white board.

So that's an interesting capability.

So it's very robust.

- You said perturbations.

Are you poking the robot?

- Yes, without harming the robot.

We are gentle.

(robot whirring)

- LEONARDO is so stable and good at adjusting its balance, that it can skateboard.

(robot whirring)

That's a fancy trick.

Not many people can go backwards on a skateboard.

How did you get the idea for a robot that will skateboard?

- Should I say the truth or make a nice story?

- [Derek] Tell us the truth.

- Yeah, so we went hiking and we saw about 10 people going down the mountain on a skateboard.

And then we thought, wow, this is really cool.

What if we try our robots to make it do this?

So we went to the first shop and we bought a skateboard.

We modified it and we tried it and it worked.

- [Derek] So do you think it allows the robot to save energy by riding on a skateboard?

- It's more efficient because it uses the legs less.

The legs are basically used to steer, and then it's just the propellors that are used to accelerate the skateboard forward and backwards.

So yeah, it makes it save a bit more energy.

- The propellors of course, make it possible to skateboard backwards.

Something I struggled with.

It definitely would help if I had a propeller.

(woman chattering)

But the real challenge was slacklining.

(upbeat latino dance music)

This looks incredibly unstable.

So I think this proves the point of just like, how important control systems are.

You can tell from the footage I have no idea what I'm doing.

(Derek shrieks)

All right, I thought I would be slightly better at that.

Let's give it another shot.

Okay.

Can anyone slackline?

Oh!

This is impossible.

I need a robot to do this for me.

(upbeat latino dance music)

(robot whirring)

I like the sidestepping technique.

Maybe I should have been doing that.

Kind of like copy his technique.

I tried to get some tips by watching Leonardo.

(robot whirring)

But improvement was negligible.

I should've prepared.

You might think it's cheating to use propellers, but the robot is clearly not flying.

It is supporting itself mostly using the rope, and it's able to stabilize itself even with the wild bouncing.

- So human professional slack liner, you can see some of their videos, actually they use arms stretched and then they can balance themselves.

We don't have the arms for LEO yet.

We are planning to add a manipulation so that he can actually carry some object.

But in the meantime, we are using the propellers to stabilize LEO while he's actually walking on a slackline.

- It's funny because like the robot feels like it's got kind of a personality to it.

The way it walks and flies.

It's just totally something you're not used to seeing.

- It looks natural.

Actually, I have to say that the sensors are sampled at 1,000 times per second, but the controller is actually being recomputed whatever signal you are sending to propellers and the leg joints is 200 times per second.

So it's pretty fast computation.

- [Derek] 200 times a second it is adjusting what it's doing to maintain balance?

- Yes, especially propeller control signal.

- How does that compare to humans?

- Oh, humans.

So humans, overall, has a few seconds of delay. Time delay.

So humans, overall, has a few seconds of delay. Time delay.

- Is this why I was struggling on the slackline?

- Maybe, but... (chuckles)

- [Derek] How do you feel about the performance here today?

- Yeah, I think it beat you.

(Derek laughs)

- I mean, not that that's hard, but this is very impressive.

If you imagine a robot like LEONARDO in the future, like the greatest LEONARDO you could make, what would that robot look like and do?

- So definitely having a LEO-like robot in space, that would be amazing.

But of course, depending on where you go, you might not be able to use propellers.

So then you would need to use thrusters.

- So eventually, yes.

We want to develop this leg-based adaptive landing gear, and then we give that to next generation Mars helicopter, or next generation flying cars so that it can actually land in very challenging conditions.

- And still move around once-

- And then once, yeah, once you land, then you can walk over.

(robot whirring)

- Imagine if you have a cliff and then you have the robot just jump out of the cliff, deploy the propellers and fly.

- [Derek] That'd be wild.

(quirky sound effect)

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