A new kind of robot swims the seas and soars the skies
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DANIEL: Zufferey, who's a mechanical engineer, wanted to see if he could build a bird-sized robot that could also move through both mediums and between them. No one had ever done that before.

ZUFFEREY: Thinking of a wing that could operate in both those fluids somewhat efficiently seems implausible, right?

DANIEL: Zufferey and his colleagues based the robot's overall body plan on a diving bird, but made a couple key departures, including no legs.

ZUFFEREY: Instead, we thought, can we go from the water straight to the air simply with the wings themselves?

DANIEL: Is this the robot here?

ZUFFEREY: Yeah. So this is the design that we came up with.

DANIEL: It's really elegant. The central body, which houses the motor, battery and electronics, is completely open.

I see the guts of this thing.

ZUFFEREY: So water floods the whole system here. You have to waterproof individually every single component.

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