Every year, about 300 natural disasters kill around 90.000 humans and affect 160 million people across the world. When analysed individually, the balance of natural disasters may be even more frightening. The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami killed around 230.000 humans on 14 countries, caused 140.000 wounded, and consequently 1.74 million people had to be taken care and displaced.
Unfortunately, robotics is still lagging behind to offer affordable solutions in these disaster scenarios. Humanoid robots may be employed for indoor inspection and manipulation tasks, but the robots would struggle with outdoor inspection. Bipedal locomotion (i.e., walking) on difficult terrains remains a big challenge to these days. On the other hand, aerial manipulation conceives flying robots with robotic arms, thus circumventing the problem of terrestrial locomotion but preserving the capacity of manipulating objects. These robots, however, struggle with moving in indoor and confined environments (e.g., inside houses), without considering their energy consumption during these tasks.
