From surveying radiation-filled nuclear sites to searching collapsed buildings for survivors, drones have enormous potential for disaster response.

But while they can journey to places inaccessible to humans, there is still the issue of what happens when they collide with an obstacle.

While immense amounts of research have gone into sensing and avoiding obstacles, in a disaster environment, equipping a drone to pick out every last jagged edge, ruptured pipe or stray bit of rubble is near-impossible.

So instead, Dr Dario Floreano, from the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, is taking a different approach.

“We should try to design drones not for collision avoidance only, but also for collision resilience,” he said today at Imperial College London’s Robotics Forum Showcase.

Floreano came to the conclusion after looking at the behaviour of flying insects, which regularly bump into objects as they move through the air, and in response created a drone with a robust outer frame and self-righting legs.

But while this protected the drone from damage, it also resulted in it veering wildly off-course, meaning the distance such a drone would be able to cover on a single charge would be much shorter than normal.

To solve this problem, Floreano and his colleagues developed an outer frame that would move independently from the rest of the drone. When the drone hit an object, the outer frame would be knocked, causing it to move in response, but the inner frame would be unaffected, allowing the drone to progress as if nothing had happened.

The resulting drone can not only collide with an array of different objects, but can even knock into a human without causing injury, making it ideal for search-and-rescue in disaster environments.

And it hasn’t remained just a product of labs: after winning the first UAE Drones For Good Award earlier this year, the drone design has been spun into its own company: Flyability.

Having just shipped its first drones – known is Gimballs – to early adopters, the company will be undertaking a full commercial launch later this year.

But in order to make disaster-response drones as effective as possible, Floreano has a further plan: to make them walk.

“Ideally we want a drone that is very far away, resists collisions, lands and walks away,” he said.

This would be ideal for damaged nuclear plants, where keeping humans at a safe distance is essential, but the ability to move both on land and in air is immensely valuable.

Although a bizarre concept, it may not be that far from reality: early prototypes have already been created.

After determining that fixed-wing drones can travel the furthest on a single charge, Floreano and his colleagues created a fixed-wing drone with wings that can twist to become flippers when it is on the ground, allowing it to crawl forward at a speed of 0.2m a second.