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New drone has legs for landing gear, enabling efficient launches
The RAVEN walks, it flies, it hops over obstacles, and it’s efficient.
The problem is they are less energy-efficient than fixed-wing aircraft, which can fly greater distances and stay airborne for longer but need a runway, a dedicated launcher, or at least a good old-fashioned throw to get to the skies. One caveat with the team’s calculations was that a fixed-wing drone with a more conventional design, one using wheels or a launcher, would be much more efficient in traditional takeoff strategies than a legged RAVEN robot. The problem is the control system in RAVEN is not adaptive; the actuators in the legs perform predefined sets of motions to send the robot on a trajectory the team figured out through computer simulations.
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