Video: Watch the robot hover and climb in the air

Tiny flying robots usually mimic nature’s flyers, like birds and insects – but perhaps that’s due to a lack of imagination. A four-winged design created by Leif Ristroph and colleagues at New York University, which boasts a body plan reminiscent of a jellyfish, is more stable in the air than insect-like machines.

The prototype consists of a carbon-fibre frame surrounded by two pairs of thin plastic wings that open and close when driven by a motor. Its shape allows it to fly upright with little effort, without requiring sensors or intelligence to adjust its wings like those used by insects. “Making a dumb machine is a nice strategy for very small robots,” says Ristroph. “Without circuits and sensors, it’s also lighter.”


The robot is tethered to a power source for now, but improvements to the motor and wings should soon let it roam free. “If you could fine-tune the shape and flexibility of the wing, you could generate more lift, which could hold a battery up,” says Ristroph.

The design should be especially useful for making centimetre-scale robots that drift through the air. It is quite robust – it can crash into objects while remaining unharmed – and with a weight of 2 grams it easily gets carried by a breeze, which could be an advantage. “We could use this type of robot to float around and take measurements, for example to monitor carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere,” says Ristroph.

The robot has often been compared to a jellyfish due to its similar overall shape. While it wasn’t designed with that animal in mind, Ristroph says it could easily be modified to move underwater. “In the water, you don’t have to worry about lift,” he says. “The challenge was to make something fly: compared with swimming it’s much more difficult.”