You might know wasps for their ability to brainwash cockroaches or inflict one of the most painful stings on Earth—one so powerful that the actual scientific advice to victims is to just lie down and scream until it passes. Lesser-known is the wasp’s superlative ability to carry loads that are unexpectedly heavy given the creature’s size.

Small drones, or “micro air vehicles,” are only able to lift the equivalent of their own weight. If we want flying robots that can move massive objects without requiring them to be the size of pterodactyls, engineers will need to come up with new ways of lifting stuff. So drone designers are looking to wasps for help, and developing creative ways to use the environment itself as a secret weapon in robotics.

If a wasp stings and knocks out prey that’s too big for it to fly off with, the predator drags the thing away. It can do this using a structure on its feet called an arolium, a pad that helps them get a grip on a surface. Combined with claws on the feet, the arolium allows wasps to maneuver objects that they can’t outright fly away with. Which means they can punch—or sting—far above their weight class.

Engineers want drones to do the same. So a new class of robots, known as FlyCroTugs, takes a cue from these feisty fliers. On the surface, they look like regular old quadrotors that would fit in your palm. But the secret is hidden away on their bellies. While sitting on the ground, one version of the machine uses hooks to snag bumps and pits to anchor itself to the surface like a wasp’s claws do, while another version uses a pad to stick to a smooth surface. The machines can then use a tiny winch to lift and drag things up to 40 times their own weight.

Kurt Hickman/Stanford News Service

The physics of the hooks are pretty straightforward—good old anchoring for leverage. “We're just trying to get these hooks lined up, one right next to another, and have them each be able to find their own bump and all pull together to generate larger forces than a single hook could,” says Stanford roboticist Matthew Estrada, who describes the machines today in Science Robotics.

The physics of the pad, on the other hand, are more dazzling. The technology, which is inspired not by wasp feet but gecko feet, isn’t particularly new—Stanford researchers have already used it to, for instance, design a gripper that might one day grab space junk in orbit. But the resulting forces can also give the FlyCroTug a gecko-like grip and give it the ability to lift like an insect.