Insect-like flying bot completes rapid somersaults and sharp turns

MIT researchers have developed a miniature aerial robot inspired by insect flight that demonstrates unprecedented speed, agility, and maneuverability. Roughly the size of a microcassette and lighter than a paperclip, the robot uses soft artificial muscles to power large flapping wings at high frequency, enabling rapid acceleration, tight turns, and complex aerial stunts such as somersaults. This marks a significant advancement over earlier insect-scale robots, which were limited to slow, predictable flight paths. The new design aims to enable these tiny flying machines to navigate confined or hazardous environments, such as collapsed buildings after earthquakes, where larger drones cannot operate. A key innovation behind the robot’s enhanced performance is a novel AI-based control system developed by MIT professors Kevin Chen and Jonathan How. This two-part system combines a model-predictive controller that plans complex flight trajectories with a lightweight deep-learning model trained via imitation learning to execute those plans in real time. This approach allows the robot to fly 447% faster and accelerate 255