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This vampire bat robot can both fly and walk by using its wings to crawl, Swiss researchers say. Future Mars rovers could also have flying bots

The Deployable Air Land Exploration Robot, or DALER, was described in the journal Bioinspiration & Biomimetics and could lead the way to rescue robots that can survey a disaster zone from above and then crawl into the wreckage below.

A team led by researchers at the Swiss institute (known as EPFL) have been looking at designing such a transformer-like robot for years; after all, most bots are built for one purpose alone, whether it's wheeling, walking, flying or swimming. But in a complex environment, sometimes it's useful to have more than one way to move.

The researchers drew from the vampire bat for inspiration. Known formally as Desmodus rotundus , it drinks blood only for sustenance (usually surviving off of large mammals like cattle). While this bat doesn't look pretty on the ground, it knows how to crawl and hop using its wings and hind legs. When walking, most of its body weight is shifted forward on the wings.

The scientists wanted to make wings that could also function as legs because that would mean they wouldn't have to build a whole extra set of structures for walking. Doing more with less keeps the weight of the robot down, making it less complicated, and probably cheaper to produce.

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