Diving drone can swap between flying and swimming

A drone that may fly like a regular quadcopter but additionally function underwater might be developed as a instrument for engineers and search and rescue groups

By Matthew Sparkes

A quadcopter that may fly like an aerial drone, but additionally splash down into water and function like a submersible, might be used for search and rescue missions or engineering inspections.

Ben Chen on the Chinese language College of Hong Kong and his colleagues created a prototype gadget known as Mirs-X, which weighs 1.63 kilograms and is 38 centimetres vast. It may hover for six minutes within the air or dive underwater for round 40 minutes. Mirs-X is waterproof at depths of as much as 3 metres and strikes at as much as 2 metres per second in water.

Its propellers spin quickly to …