Flying Robot
Thirty-gram aircraft steers itself

Results: Swiss researchers have built a robotic aircraft with an 80-centimeter wingspan that flew indoors for about four minutes, detecting walls and automatically turning away from them, thanks to two one-gram cameras, a gyroscope, and a small microcontroller onboard.

Why It Matters: Small robots that can operate inside buildings or in tight spaces like caves or tunnels may be useful for search-and-rescue, reconnaissance, and inspection applications. Researchers have previously tested larger flying robots outdoors with fewer obstacles and indoors doing limited maneuvers like landing. Here, Jean-Christophe Zufferey and Dario Floreano of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne have shown that a smaller aircraft can fly indoors for a relatively long period of time while successfully avoiding collisions.