Robots with multimodal locomotion capability are almost always a compromise, because usually they’re a hodgepodge of mobility systems that don’t really work together.
It’d be possible to make a legged robot fly by stapling a bunch of propellers to it, but at any given time, either the legs or the propellers are going to be mostly just awkward extra mass. Some robots make this compromise more elegantly than others, but it’s still a compromise.
A new quadrupedal robot under development at The University of Tokyo called SPIDAR aims to minimize this compromise by combining legs and propellers and relying on that combination for both walking and flying locomotion—instead of leg actuators, it’s got vectorable leg thrusters that can both move leg joints individually and get the entire robot completely airborne.
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