It looks and moves like a mosquito, but you wouldn’t want to hit it with a flyswatter. Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently invented a drone that’s modeled after flying insects. The tiny remote-controlled robot weighs just 0.02 ounces, about the same as a paper clip.
Its wings flap nearly 500 times per second, more than twice as fast as a honeybee’s. Like flying insects, the drone can dart in different directions and withstand gusts of wind and collisions with walls or other objects.
“You can hit it when it’s flying, and it can recover,” says Kevin Chen, who led the team of researchers. “It can also do aggressive maneuvers like somersaults in the air.”
Chen is still perfecting the design, but he hopes that one day the mini-drones will be used for a variety of purposes. For example, they might be used in place of real insects to pollinate crops. The flying robots could also be fitted with cameras and sent to hard-to-reach spaces. They could be used to inspect the insides of machines or to search for missing people after a disaster such as a building collapse.
“All those things can be very challenging for existing large-scale robots,” Chen says.