Tiny insect-like robot can flip, loop and hover for up to 15 minutes

A flying robot the size of a postage stamp can hover for up to 15 minutes without breaking, and it can perform acrobatic manoeuvres

By Alex Wilkins

17 January 2025

A tiny drone powered by soft muscle-like actuators

Kevin Chen

An insect-inspired robot that only weighs as much as a raisin can perform acrobatics and fly for much longer than any previous insect-sized drone without falling apart.

For tiny flying robots to make nimble manoeuvres, they need to be lightweight and agile but also capable of withstanding large forces. Such forces mean that most tiny robots can only fly for around 20 seconds before breaking, which makes it difficult to collect enough data to properly calibrate and test the robots’ flying abilities.

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Now, Suhan Kim at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues have developed an insect-like flying robot about the size of a postage stamp that can execute acrobatic manoeuvres, such as double flips or tracing an infinity sign, and also hover in the air for up to 15 minutes without failing.

Kim and his team adapted the design from a previous flying robot, but they made the joints more resilient by having them connect across a larger part of the robot than at just a single failure point. This reduced the force through the joints by a factor of around 100, says Kim. They also used muscle-like soft actuators to move the wings, rather than standard electric motors.