MIT's Tiny Flying Robot Achieves 450% Faster Movement with AI
Date: September 22, 2026
Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Summary
A new AI control system lets MIT's tiny flying robot move with insect-like agility, boosting its speed by about 450 percent and allowing it to perform 10 somersaults in 11 seconds. The technology could eventually enable miniature robots to search earthquake rubble and navigate dangerous spaces that conventional drones cannot reach.
Tiny flying robots may one day help rescuers search for people trapped beneath collapsed buildings after earthquakes. Because of their small size, these robotic insects could potentially move through narrow spaces that larger drones cannot enter while avoiding walls, debris, and falling objects.
Until recently, however, aerial microrobots have been far less nimble than the insects that inspired them. They typically moved slowly and followed relatively simple flight paths.
Researchers at MIT have now demonstrated a new approach that gives an insect-scale flying robot much greater speed and agility. The team developed an AI-based controller that allows the robotic bug to perform demanding aerial maneuvers, including repeated body flips.
Using a two-part control system designed to balance performance with computational efficiency, the researchers increased the robot's speed by about 450 percent and its acceleration by about 250 percent compared with their previous best results.
The robot was agile enough to complete 10 consecutive somersaults in 11 seconds, even while wind disturbances tried to knock it away from its intended path.
"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," says Kevin Chen, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), head of the Soft and Micro Robotics Laboratory within the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), and co-senior author of a paper on the robot.
Chen is joined on the paper by co-senior author... [content truncated]