Caltech’s LEONARDO Is a Bipedal Robot That Can Skateboard and Slackline

Engineers at Caltech’s Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies (CAST) have developed a new type of robot that’s essentially a drone with legs, allowing it to perform complex movements, such as skateboarding, hopping or walking a slackline. Known as LEONARDO (LEgs ONboARD drone), the robot is equipped with multi-joint legs and thrusters to maintain balance similarly to birds, which combine a level of walking and flying to move between telephone poles.

While climbing stairs and running around obstacles are impressive for bipedal robots, traversing rough terrain is much more difficult. Bipedal robots such as Boston Dynamic’s Atlas has shown us its fantastic capability to perform backflips and traverse smooth terrain, which it does by mimicking the way humans move. On the other hand, drones can avoid the ground altogether, but they’re saddled with their limitations as well, including limited battery power and payload capacity.

LEO blends the best of both robotic platforms and stands 2.5 feet tall, making it one of the smaller bipedal robots, but it still proves effective. It was designed using two legs that have three actuated joints and four propeller thrusters mounted at an angle on the robot’s shoulders. It walks similarly to humans by adjusting its legs so that its center of mass moves slightly forward while maintaining balance using its upper body drone.

During flight, LEO relies on its upper drone body alone while disengaging the legs. Because it relies on the drone half for balance, it can be poked and prodded with a lot of force and remain upright. The engineers plan on improving LEONARDO's esign in future revisions with more rigid legs and better thrust capabilities. They’re also looking at ways to make it autonomous to understand how much weight is supported by its legs and then adjust its thrusters accordingly for more efficient movement.