EU approves funding for shape-shifting Empa drones

According to a press release issued by the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa), Prof. Dr. Mirko Kovac has been awarded a coveted ERC Consolidator Grant within the framework of Horizon Europe, a key funding program for research and innovation coordinated by the European Union (EU). These grants are worth a total of 2 million euros and aim to secure the work of individual researchers and their teams for a period of five years.

Kovac works at the Materials and Technology Center of Robotics in Dübendorf in the canton of Zurich. It was founded in 2019 as a joint venture between Empa and Imperial College London. Kovac is Head of the Dübendorf Robotics Center and Aerial Robotics Laboratory at Imperial College London. Together, the two institutions are in the process of developing shape-shifting drones, otherwise known as metamorphic drones.

The aim is to create micro air vehicles (MAVs) capable of both flying and diving as well as autonomously taking off into the air from beneath the water surface again. In addition to underwater exploration, such functionalities would facilitate applications such as water quality monitoring in inaccessible regions and search and rescue operations.

As the British university explains in a YouTube video, Kovac and his team have technically implemented key design principles inspired by nature for the development of air and water robots. For example, foldable wings and a diving strategy for entering the water, as well as a water thrust drive to rapidly exit the water and water-repellent surfaces.

“This grant is a wonderful support that will leverage previous work in robot metamorphosis and allow my team to develop a technological step change”, comments Kovac in the Empa press release. As part of his ProteusDrone project, he will collaborate with international experts in the fields of computer vision and evolutionary biology.