[vanderZwan]

Robots and living animals have different limitations and constraints though: compared to separate legs and wings for animals, using one motor with some kind of gearbox to switch output from wings/propellers to legs might have a lower added cost in terms of weight . The legs can stay very skinny. The limitation would be how bulky such a gearbox would be, and how much extra kinetic energy loss it would introduce. At the same time creating functioning wings that can also work as legs sounds like it might be a huge challenge in robotics (unless there's a way to massively simplify it).

Definitely an interesting idea that should be investigated though! :)

(Also, I've seen so many "AI learns to walk" videos that I'm wondering if it could be used to find a design that would work for this task)