Photo credit: HiPeR Lab
Jerry Tang walked into UC Berkeley’s HiPeR Lab with a small shoebox-sized container in his hands. Inside was a compact quadcopter drone called DUAWLFIN, which was super light – lighter than a bag of oranges – and could move at a pretty good clip – faster than someone who’s taking a brisk walk. Four propellers, four motors, and four wheels – basically just the essentials. Tang flipped a switch on his laptop and DUAWLFIN took off, hovering for a second before dropping straight down in a bit of a free fall. The propellers just kept spinning though, and the wheels suddenly kicked in, taking over.
Ruiqi Zhang, the graduate student who had recorded the demo over coffee, fills me in on the trick. As it turns out, their solution is hidden inside each wheel hub: a nice little one-way bearing. You know, the type that lets a bike go downhill without the rider having to pedal backwards. When you turn the motor forward, the propeller sucks up a load of air. Spin it backwards, and the bearing locks in, making the wheel rotate. Two motors spin one way, two the other, and the drone moves just like a tank – left pair spins forward, right pair spins backwards, and it pivots in a tiny radius.
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When DUAWLFIN’s on the floor, it only needs 15 watts to get going at 2 meters per second, which is slow enough to sneak through office chairs but fast enough to beat a spilled coffee to the door. And even if you tilt the floor at a 30 degree angle, it’ll just keep on climbing; the bearings don’t care about the slope. In the air, the wheels only create 3 percent drag, which is almost nothing when it comes to the batteries.
The energy charts show just how much of a difference DUAWLFIN makes. A standard drone on delivery missions can take 4 minutes to cross 200 meters of a long hallway. DUAWLFIN makes that same trip, on its wheels, in a blistering 90 seconds, and still has enough juice left over to fly all the way back home. It’s those tight indoor spaces – warehouse corridors, apartment hallways, even hospital rooms – where there aren’t landing pads for every single door – these are the places where suddenly all sorts of machines are going to turn up, standing there wondering whether to take to the air or just take it on the road.
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