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Small ground robots remain limited in their locomotion capabilities, often prevented from accessing areas restricted by tall obstacles or rough terrain. This paper presents the improved design of a hybrid-locomotion robot made to address this issue. It uses wheels for ground travel and rotarywing flight for scaling obstacles and flying over rough terrain.The robot's initial design suffered from a number of issues that prevented it from functioning fully, such as overheating motors, inadequate control electronics, and insufficient landing gear. Several improvements have been made to the robot's design to correct these problems.These obstacles, and the solutions implemented in the improved design, have enabled several design principles to be formulated for miniature hybrid-locomotion robots. It is found that hybrid-locomotion vehicles utilizing rotary-wing flight are most useful when the design is optimized for ground mode performance. Collapsibility is necessary in such vehicles to reduce the impact of the helicopter rotor on the size of the ground mode. Finally, since a large number of actions are necessary to propel and transform the robot, integrating multiple functions into each mechanism can reduce the mass of the robot.

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Selecting an aerial platform for an application typically requires compromise. A choice must be made between the flight time and long-range capabilities of a fixed-wing aircraft or the maneuverability and stationary characteristics of a multi-rotor platform. Recent developments of small-scale solar-powered UAVs have leveraged the advances in solar cell, energy storage, and propulsion system technology to reach extended flight times capable of all-day and multi-day flight.This paper presents the concept of a small-scale hybrid unmanned aerial vehicle capable of augmenting the maneuverability of a quad-rotor with the energy collection and supply of a solar-powered fixed-wing aircraft. An investigation into the aircraft design, transforming mechanism, and energy management of the multi-state system is presented.A proof-of-concept prototype has been constructed to demonstrate the airframe operating in a quad-rotor configuration. Power electronics capable of simultaneous battery charging and power loading from a solar array have been validated. Additional work in optimization of the propulsion system and airframe needs to be completed to maximize the performance of the hybrid system.

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