After an earthquake, survivors can become trapped beneath piles of unstable debris where conventional rescue robots are too large to enter. Tiny flying machines modeled on insects could one day move through these narrow gaps while avoiding fixed barriers and falling rubble.

Until recently, however, aerial microrobots could only travel slowly along simple, smooth paths, falling far short of the rapid and agile flight seen in insects — until now.

AI unlocks insectlike aerial agility
MIT researchers have demonstrated aerial microrobots that can match the speed and agility of their biological counterparts. They developed a new AI-based controller that allowed the robotic insect to perform demanding flight maneuvers, including repeated body flips.

The two-part control system combines strong performance with computational efficiency. Compared with the researchers’ best earlier demonstrations, it increased the robot’s speed by about 450 percent and its acceleration by roughly 250 percent.

The microrobot completed 10 consecutive somersaults in 11 seconds while maintaining control even as wind disturbances pushed against it.

Flight performance approaches living insects
“We want to be able to use these robots in scenarios that more traditional quadcopter robots would have trouble flying into, but that insects could navigate. Now, with our bioinspired control framework, the flight performance of our robot is comparable to insects in terms of speed, acceleration, and the pitching angle. This is quite an exciting step toward that future goal,”