Never under-estimate Daily Mail headline writers. 'Scientists plan "self-repairing city" with an army of drones that fix streetlights and potholes without being told to', it screamed back in October. Visions of swarms of drones perched, perhaps slightly malevolently, looking down on us from lighting columns until, slowly, spreading their 'wings', they open... Well, perhaps not. Nevertheless, whoever it was who came up with the idea of describing a pioneering research project being led by Leeds University's School of Civil Engineering as developing (among other things) 'perch and repair' robots to repair lighting columns certainly did not help. 'It'd be fair to say there's been a lot of media interest,' concedes the school's Professor Philip Purnell. 'If I knew the answer to what these things are going to look like or how they're going to work then we wouldn't need the research project. But it might not necessarily be a flying drone, there could be other ways to do it.'
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