Drone Flies Into Ice Crevasse

LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND—Flyability, a Swiss creator of rescue drones, has captured footage of an ice crevasse descent with its Gimball, billed as “the world’s first collision-tolerant flying robot capable of remaining stable after contacts and safe to fly close to people.” The Gimball won last year’s $1 million prize in the UAE’s inaugural “Drones for Good” competition, said to be “dedicated to transforming the innovative technologies behind civilian drones into practical, realizable solutions for improving people’s lives today.”

The Gimball was created to facilitate trap rescues from such places as building rubble or ice crevasses. The Flyability crevasse dive shows how the Gimball—basically, a drone that operates within a rotationally decoupled cage—can bump into an ice wall, shake it off, and keep on flying.