A quadcopter that can fly like an aerial drone, but also splash down into water and operate like a submersible, could be used for search and rescue missions or engineering inspections.
Ben Chen at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and his colleagues created a prototype device called Mirs-X, which weighs 1.63 kilograms and is 38 centimetres wide. It can hover for 6 minutes in the air or dive underwater for around 40 minutes. Mirs-X is waterproof at depths of up to 3 metres and moves at up to 2 metres per second in water.
Its propellers spin rapidly to…
