Engineers at Drexel University have a grant from the National Science Foundation to see if "dexterous limbs" can be successfully added to drones.
The "Mobile Manipulating UAVs" (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) as they are being called, once developed, would be capable of performing "active near ground tasks."
Dr. Paul Oh, a professor at Drexel, envisions a wide range of helpful, innocuous activities: Infrastructure repair, disaster recovery, border inspection, agricultural handling, search and rescue missions...
One of the tricks will be to see if drones can interact with objects without upsetting their own applecarts in the process.
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