Watch an Animal-Inspired Robot Transform Into a Flying Drone

While certain people might have you believe that the robot uprising is here, bots are still incredibly helpful to humans for now. In fact, they may even save your life one day.

Engineers at the California Institute of Technology working with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory created an animal-inspired robot dubbed the Multi-Modal Mobility Morphobot (M4) that shapeshifts to navigate any environment it encounters. The team believes that the device has widespread applications in automated package delivery, scientific research, and search and rescue operations—and may one day include AI so it can do so automatically.

“We have designed a robot capable of negotiating unstructured, multi-substrate environments, including land and air, by employing its components in different ways as wheels, thrusters, and legs,” the team wrote in a paper of their findings published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.

Read more at The Daily Beast.