A newly created real-life Transformer is capable of reconfiguring its body to achieve eight distinct types of motion and can autonomously assess the environment it faces to choose the most effective combination of motions to maneuver.

The new robot, dubbed M4 (for Multi-Modal Mobility Morphobot) can roll on four wheels, turn its wheels into rotors and fly, stand on two wheels like a meerkat to peer over obstacles, “walk” by using its wheels like feet, use two rotors to help it roll up steep slopes on two wheels, tumble, and more.

A robot with such a broad set of capabilities would have applications ranging from the transport of injured people to a hospital to the exploration of other planets, says Mory Gharib (Ph. D. ‘83), the Hans W. Liepmann Professor of Aeronautics and Bioinspired Engineering and director of Caltech’s Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies (CAST), where the robot was developed.

Huge libraries of drug compounds may hold potential treatments for a variety of diseases, such as cancer or heart disease. Ideally, scientists would like to experimentally test each of these compounds against all possible targets, but doing that kind of screen is prohibitively time-consuming.

In recent years, researchers have begun using computational methods to screen those libraries in hopes of speeding up drug discovery. However, many of those methods also take a long time, as most of them calculate each target protein’s three-dimensional structure from its amino-acid.