Entomopter

The terrestrial Entomopter is a multimode (flying/crawling) insect-like robot developed by Robert C. Michelson and his design team from the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), University of Cambridge, ETS Labs and others.

A twin set of wings situated fore and aft of the RCM provide balanced resonant flapping to create not only lift and thrust, but full vehicle control.

Also, the high speed flight means that dwell time on any particular area will be difficult—a negative feature that is compounded by the fact that turns in the thin atmosphere will require enormous radii.

An entomopter, on the other hand, can achieve abnormally high lift with rapidly flapping wings (in part due to the "leading edge vortex" phenomenon), and therefore allows the fuselage to move slowly in relation to the ground.

[3][2] An Entomopter-based Mars Flyer holds promise of not only flying slowly over the Martian landscape, but also of serving as a multimode vehicle which could land, take samples, recharge, or communicate, and then take off to continue the survey mission.