Level 1 — Absolute Beginner
Engineers at MIT built a very small flying robot. It is about the size of a real insect, like a bee. It has tiny wings that flap up and down.
The robot has a computer brain inside it. This week, the engineers gave the robot a new, smarter brain. The new brain uses AI, which means artificial intelligence.
With the new brain, the robot can fly much faster. It is about four and a half times faster than before. It can also do somersaults in the air, like a tiny acrobat.
The robot did ten somersaults in only eleven seconds. It could even do this in windy weather. One day, robots like this could search for people after an earthquake.
- robot
- a machine that can move and do tasks on its own
- insect
- a small animal like a bee, ant, or fly
- wing
- a body part used for flying
- brain
- the part that controls thinking and decisions
- fast
- moving with great speed
- turn
- to change direction
- wind
- moving air
- search
- to look for something carefully
Level 2 — Elementary
Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, known as MIT, have built a tiny flying robot about the size of an insect. It has flapping wings, much like a bee or a fly.
This week, the team gave the robot a new artificial intelligence control system. The AI acts as the robot's brain, deciding how to move its wings in real time to stay balanced and controlled.
The new AI system increased the robot's top speed by about 450 percent and its acceleration by about 250 percent, compared with earlier versions of the robot. It also let the robot perform sharp turns and flips that were impossible before.
In tests, the robot completed ten consecutive somersaults in just eleven seconds, even while researchers tried to blow it off course with wind. Engineers hope tiny robots like this could one day search through earthquake rubble or other dangerous spaces too small for people or larger drones.
- artificial intelligence
- computer systems that can perform tasks requiring human-like thinking
- control system
- the part of a machine that manages how it moves or behaves
- balanced
- kept steady and even
- acceleration
- the rate at which speed increases
- consecutive
- following one after another without a break
- disturbance
- something that interrupts or disrupts a steady state
- rubble
- broken pieces of stone, brick, or concrete from a damaged building
- drone
- a flying machine controlled remotely or by computer, without a pilot on board
Level 3 — Intermediate
Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have equipped their insect-scale flapping-wing microrobot with a new artificial intelligence control system that dramatically expands what the tiny machine can do in the air.
The new controller, described as a two-part system balancing performance with computational efficiency, increased the robot's speed by roughly 450 percent and its acceleration by about 250 percent compared with earlier iterations, while enabling maneuvers such as rapid body flips that the earlier control system could not reliably execute.
In demonstrations, the robot performed ten consecutive somersaults in eleven seconds, maintaining its intended flight path even as researchers introduced wind disturbances meant to knock it off course, a test of robustness rather than just raw agility.
The team also demonstrated a maneuver resembling insect saccades, in which the robot pitches aggressively, accelerates rapidly to a new position, and pitches back the other way to stop, mirroring a movement pattern long observed in real flying insects but rarely reproduced convincingly in robotic systems this small.
- microrobot
- a robot built at a very small, often insect-like, scale
- iterations
- successive versions of something being developed
- maneuvers
- controlled movements requiring skill
- robustness
- the ability to remain effective under difficult conditions
- disturbances
- forces or events that disrupt a normal state
- saccades
- rapid, sharp movements between positions
- pitches
- tilts forward or backward
- reproduced
- made to happen again in the same way
Level 4 — Advanced
The insect-scale flapping-wing microrobot developed at MIT has, with the addition of a new artificial intelligence controller, closed much of the gap between engineered flight and the biological original it was designed to emulate, a milestone measured less in the robot's raw speed gains than in the specific maneuvers it can now execute under disturbance.
The controller's two-part architecture, designed explicitly to trade computational efficiency against performance rather than maximizing either in isolation, delivered a roughly 450 percent increase in top speed and a 250 percent gain in acceleration over prior iterations, figures that matter less on their own than in combination with the robot's newly demonstrated capacity for ten consecutive somersaults in eleven seconds while under active wind disturbance.
That last detail is the more consequential one: agility demonstrated in still air says comparatively little about a robot's usefulness in the cluttered, turbulent environments, collapsed structures, ventilation shafts, disaster rubble, where such machines are ultimately meant to operate, and robustness under deliberate disturbance is the harder and more relevant benchmark.
Perhaps most notable is the team's reproduction of insect-like saccades, the aggressive pitch-accelerate-pitch sequence long documented in real flying insects, a maneuver that other flapping-wing robots have struggled to replicate convincingly at this scale; its appearance here suggests the new controller has captured something closer to the underlying logic of insect flight rather than merely mimicking its outward appearance.
- emulate
- to try to match or reproduce the qualities of something else
- architecture
- the overall structure or design of a system
- trade off
- to accept less of one quality in exchange for more of another
- benchmark
- a standard used to judge or measure performance
- turbulent
- moving in an unpredictable, disordered way
- collapsed
- having fallen down or caved in
- replicate
- to reproduce or copy exactly
- underlying
- forming the basis or foundation of something
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