The robot is called DALER (Deployable Air-Land Exploration Robot), and I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that Ludovic Daler is the lead author on
a paper that’s just been published in Bionspiration & Biomimetics. The focus of the paper is, of course, the robot’s adaptive wings, which enable ground locomotion without sacrificing much weight or structural efficiency, since the rotating wingtips double as an attitude control system when the robot is in the air. The foldable wings (studying the bats helped out here) help to increase walking efficiency on the ground, and also allow the robot to squeeze into places that it might not otherwise be able to reach.
It’s obvious that DALER is, um, not the most graceful of robots when it’s stuck on the ground, but there’s a huge difference between the
zero ground mobility that most aerial robots have and
some ground mobility, however limited. For what it’s worth, bats operate the same way. In the air, DALER can reach 20 m/s, while on the ground, it tops out at 6 cm/s. It’s not going to get very far at 6 cm/s, but in a search and rescue scenario, the ability to move on the ground at all means that it can land and scramble around a little bit, maybe moving underneath obstructions to investigate areas that are otherwise inaccessible from the air.