The RoboBee project marks a continuing evolution in miniature aerial robotics, advancing from flight capability to controlled, reliable landings on unpredictable surfaces. Building on a legacy of untethered, insect-scale flight demonstrations, researchers have redesigned the landing gear to mimic the physical strategies used by crane flies. This biomechanical approach aims to reduce impact energy during touchdown and to accommodate uneven surfaces, a critical step toward robust, autonomous operation in real-world environments. The latest findings detail how these innovations enable RoboBee to land safely not just on flat surfaces but also on leaves and other irregular substrates, bringing a new level of practicality to tiny, fleet-like robotic systems. The breakthrough is documented in a recent journal article that synthesizes a sequence of design iterations, experimental tests, and takeoff–landing sequences that collectively demonstrate the improved robustness of the device’s landings.
The RoboBee project: background, goals, and the path to autonomous, untethered flight
Since its earliest demonstration, RoboBee has represented a landmark achievement in micro-robotics, delivering partially untethered flight for a robot scarcely larger than a few coins. Over the years, the project has progressively expanded its flight repertoire to include hovering, diving, and sustained flight under controlled conditions. The central objective has always been more ambitious: to develop a swarm of tiny, interconnected robots capable of sustained, untethered flight. This broad aim is inherently challenging due to the insect-sized scale, where the dynamics of air, surface interactions, and control actuation differ fundamentally from larger aerial platforms. The project’s historical arc includes milestones such as achieving the lightest insect-scale robot capable of sustained, untethered flight, followed by refinements that led to the development of a more maneuverable variant zooming in on precise aerial control. In parallel, the researchers have explored biomechanics-inspired movements from other species, translating biological principles into robotics with the hope of expanding both capability and resilience. The iterative process reflects a broader scientific commitment to decoupling the constraints that previously limited small-scale aerial devices, especially the persistent challenge of maintaining stable flight while executing delicate landings.
As the team has progressed, a consistent theme has emerged: the key to reliable landings lies not only in the propulsion and control systems but also in the mechanical design of contact interfaces. The researchers have repeatedly emphasized the importance of reducing touchdown velocity and rapidly dissipating impact energy upon contact. In prior work, a straightforward approach often involved cutting thrust as the vehicle approached the surface and letting gravity guide the final contact, with the hope that the craft would land upright. This strategy, while sometimes successful, exposed the vehicle to landing failures on uneven terrain and increased wear on critical components. The current line of inquiry shifts the emphasis toward an integrated solution in which the landing gear itself plays an active role in moderating energy absorption and stabilizing the robot during and after touchdown. This shift represents a move from treating landing as a passive event to treating it as an engineered interaction that benefits from precise mechanical damping and strategic contact geometry.
In parallel with these efforts, the team has drawn on natural analogs to inspire mechanical innovation. The crane fly, a close-sized relative in terms of wingspan and body mass, presents a natural model for robust landings on complex substrates. Its long, jointed appendages can dissipate impact energy and accommodate surface irregularities in a way that is fundamentally different from rigid, flat-footed approaches. By studying these natural mechanisms, the researchers aim to imbue RoboBee with similar capabilities, enabling it to land on a leaf or another uneven surface with a higher probability of success across repeated trials. The research thus sits at the intersection of biomechanics, materials science, and control engineering, leveraging insights from nature to inform a design that is practical for a micro-robot operating in real-world environments. The ultimate aim remains to realize autonomous, scalable robotic systems that can operate safely in environments that are not artificially prepared or perfectly smooth.
The scientific narrative also includes a broader context: learning how to land reliably contributes to the overarching vision of micro-robot swarms, capable of distributed sensing, environmental monitoring, and collaborative tasks. A robust landing mechanism is essential for any long-duration operation, particularly in applications such as environmental monitoring, disaster surveillance, or pollination-like tasks where precise, repeated landings become a regular requirement. The work underscores the recognition that aerial autonomy is not solely about staying aloft but also about reestablishing stable contact with a surface and resuming flight after a pause or a lateral shift. The combination of flight control, mechanical design, and energy management forms a cohesive approach to expanding the practical envelope of insect-scale robotics. Researchers continue to iterate on these aspects, with the understanding that a successful landing is a prerequisite for more ambitious capabilities such as fully autonomous operation without tethered control.
The project’s trajectory reflects a deliberate sequence of milestones that collectively illuminate a path forward for compact aerial robotics. Early demonstrations established fundamental flight and hover capabilities, while subsequent iterations introduced increased maneuverability and control precision. The current focus on landing mechanics closes an important loop in this progression, addressing one of the most challenging aspects of real-world operation: how to transition gracefully from airborne motion to contact, hold steady, and, if needed, transition back into flight. The broader implication is that mastering these contact dynamics is foundational to any attempt to coordinate multiple micro-robots in a swarm, particularly in environments where surface variability and environmental factors complicate control. By embedding biomechanical principles into the landing system, the researchers are not only solving a practical problem but also contributing to a deeper understanding of how small-scale robotic systems can emulate the robustness of natural flyers. The article charts this evolution, linking past achievements to present innovations and outlining the steps envisioned for future enhancements, including on-board sensing and autonomy.
Biomechanical inspiration: why crane-fly-like appendages help landings
A central theme of the landing gear redesign is to replicate the functional advantages observed in crane-fly locomotion. The architecture of the crane fly’s legs and joints provides a natural template for damping and energy absorption during touchdown, particularly on uneven ground. By translating these biomechanical principles into the RoboBee’s mechanical design, the team aims to improve the robot’s resilience to surface irregularities, reduce impact forces, and decrease the likelihood of tipping or tipping-like instability during contact. The crane fly-inspired limbs act as distributed, articulated dampers, allowing the robot to conform to the contours of a leaf or other nonuniform substrates. This approach promises more reliable landings across a variety of textures and angles, extending the operational envelope of the robot beyond controlled laboratory surfaces. The concept rests on a fundamental understanding of contact mechanics at the insect scale, where the interplay between limb stiffness, damping, mass distribution, and contact geometry determines how energy is managed during a landing.
From a design perspective, the crane-fly-inspired limbs introduce a combination of compliance and control that is subtle yet powerful. The compliant joints absorb a portion of the kinetic energy that would otherwise translate into sudden deceleration, reducing peak forces that could destabilize the vehicle. In the context of micro-robotics, even modest reductions in impact energy can translate into meaningful gains in landing reliability, repeatability, and lifespan of actuators and sensors. The approach also emphasizes how a distributed mechanism, rather than a single rigid foot, can provide more adaptable contact with diverse surfaces. On a practical level, the new landing system requires careful tuning of joint dynamics to achieve an underdamped response that harmonizes with the robot’s takeoff and flight behavior. The result is a more graceful touchdown sequence, where the vehicle can settle onto leaf edges or irregular planes without suffering abrupt, damaging jolts.
The biomechanical inspiration also informs the broader design philosophy for future iterations. If the landing gear can emulate the natural dampening capabilities observed in large, robust insects, engineers can pursue more ambitious scenarios, including landings on surfaces that are not perfectly flat or planar. This would be critical for deploying swarms of RoboBees in open environments, where leaves, branches, and other natural features present a mosaic of contact challenges. The crane-fly-inspired design thus represents more than a single feature; it embodies a strategy for resilience that aligns with the project’s long-term goals of autonomy, adaptability, and scalability. The research highlights how biological principles can be translated into mechanical advantages, bridging the gap between living systems and human-made micro-robots, and opening the door to new modes of operation that were previously out of reach for devices of this size.
Beyond the immediate mechanical benefits, the crane-fly-inspired approach also invites a rethinking of the control strategy associated with landings. A compliant, energy-dissipating limb system interacts with the vehicle’s sensors and actuators in ways that change the timing and magnitude of actuator inputs during the final approach. This interplay necessitates refined estimation of contact events, improved sensory feedback around the limb joints, and more robust state estimation that can accommodate small perturbations without destabilizing the platform. In practical terms, designers anticipate a smoother transition from hover to contact, followed by a stable post-touchdown state from which takeoff or lateral movement can resume. The result is a more versatile platform capable of negotiating the unpredictable topology of natural surfaces, with potential benefits for mission duration, data quality, and mission flexibility.
In summary, the crane-fly-inspired landing gear embodies a principled shift toward energy-aware, surface-adaptive landings. It leverages the natural advantages of compliant joints and distributed contact geometry to manage the complex dynamics encountered at insect scale. The outcome is a RoboBee platform that can touch down on a leaf or similar uneven substrates with higher reliability and less risk of destabilization, while supporting the broader objective of creating autonomous, small-scale aerial systems capable of sustained operation in real-world environments. This biomechanical philosophy provides a foundation for future improvements in leg geometry, damping characteristics, and integration with onboard sensing, all of which are essential to advancing the practical deployment of RoboBees and related micro-robotic systems.
Experimental workflow: how the team tested, tuned, and validated the landing system
A rigorous experimental program underpins the development of the new landing mechanism, combining controlled laboratory tests with increasingly realistic scenarios. The research team began by probing the mechanical behavior of the redesigned legs and joints under oscillatory conditions. This phase involved deliberately disturbing the leg assembly and then releasing it, while capturing the resulting motion with high-speed cameras. The intent was to characterize the dynamic response of the leg system, identifying how the leg and joints behave as an underdamped spring-mass-damper model with slight viscoelastic creep. By mapping this dynamic profile, researchers established a baseline for how energy is stored, released, and dissipated during contact. This baseline informed subsequent tests and guided the selection of materials, joint stiffness, and damping parameters to optimize landing performance.
Following the leg characterization, the team progressed to free-fall experiments using small fiberglass crash-test dummies designed to mimic RoboBee in terms of mass and inertia. These test artifacts provided a safe, repeatable way to explore how different takeoff and landing approaches affect energy absorption and stability during impact. High-speed video captured every fall, allowing analysts to observe contact events frame by frame and quantify key metrics such as peak deceleration, contact duration, and post-contact orientation. The data from these tests supported iterative modifications to the leg geometry and damping properties, enabling the designers to refine how the system transitions from flight to ground contact and beyond.
With the mechanical groundwork established, the researchers conducted a series of takeoff and landing trials that combined travel between leaves with short hovering phases in between. The setup was designed to emulate a realistic sequence in which RoboBee would fly from one plant surface to another, hovering briefly to reestablish stabilization before attempting a second landing. Each trial varied several parameters, including approach angle, altitude at touchdown, and the position of the landing surface. The experiments were conducted within a motion-capture arena in which a plant branch was introduced to provide a realistic, flexible structure for RoboBee to approach and touch down upon. This added level of environmental complexity was critical for assessing how the landing system would perform when dealing with surfaces that are not perfectly rigid or uniform.
Across repeated trials, RoboBee demonstrated the ability to commence takeoff from a leaf, hover, perform lateral movement, hover again, and then land safely on a second leaf or an equivalent uneven surface. The core setup remained consistent with prior experiments, except for the introduction of a plant branch into the capture space to better simulate natural landings. The results showed increased resilience of the landing sequence to small perturbations and varied approach conditions, indicating that the landing system’s damping and contact strategies were functioning as intended. The team documented the observable improvements in landing reliability, noting how the combination of energy absorption at the joints and controlled approach velocity contributed to more stable landings on non-flat substrates.
The next phase of the workflow focuses on incremental improvements and the pursuit of more complex scenarios. Researchers plan to enhance mechanical damping by drawing lessons from a broader range of natural flyers, including stingless bees and mosquitoes, whose landing techniques reveal a spectrum of damping strategies suitable for micro-scale platforms. They also anticipate scaling the technology to larger vehicles, which will demand careful reengineering of leg geometry to preserve the advantageous damping behavior while handling increased mass and inertia. A practical challenge still ahead is transitioning from tethered control systems to onboard electronics with integrated sensors. Off-board control provides flexibility for experimentation, but the ultimate objective is full autonomy, powered by onboard sensing and processing. The team acknowledges that safety tethers been a barrier to rapid experimentation, so removing those tethers is a critical step toward enabling longer, more varied mission profiles without compromising safety or control integrity.
The researchers emphasize that every experimental result informs a feedback loop: observations about how the landings behave under varied conditions feed into iterative redesigns of joints, dampers, and control strategies, and those redesigns, in turn, yield new data from subsequent tests. This iterative process is central to achieving the long-term goal of autonomous, reliable landings in an open environment. It also aligns with the project’s broader ambition to build a scalable system that can operate in diverse settings—from laboratory benches to actual outdoor landscapes—without requiring specialized infrastructure to support each mission. As experiments continue, the team remains focused on quantifying and understanding the energy pathways during landing, the stability margins during contact, and the resilience of the system to perturbations such as wind gusts or minor mechanical misalignments. In doing so, they aim to produce a robust, repeatable landing protocol that can be generalized across RoboBee configurations and related micro-robotic platforms.
In terms of methodological rigor, the research combines high-speed videography, motion capture, and precise instrumentation to quantify the landing dynamics. Oscillatory tests help characterize the underdamped nature of the legs, while free-fall tests isolate the energy-absorption properties independent of propulsion control. The sequential takeoffs and landings provide a practical assessment of how well the system preserves stability and upright orientation when transitioning between surfaces of varying roughness and curvature. By integrating these data sources, the team builds a comprehensive picture of how mechanical damping, joint compliance, and surface interaction govern landing performance. The outcome is a well-supported design path toward a landing gear that can handle a spectrum of surface textures and shapes while maintaining consistent performance.
Results: how well RoboBee lands on leaves and other uneven surfaces
The experimental program yielded tangible improvements in RoboBee’s landing performance, demonstrating a notable enhancement in the robot’s ability to settle on second, uneven surfaces after a sequence of takeoffs and hover phases. Across multiple trials, the redesigned legs and joints consistently moderated impact energy and reduced the likelihood of destabilizing post-touchdown motions. The observed outcomes indicate that the combination of damped limb dynamics and carefully calibrated approach velocities helps RoboBee land more reliably on leaves, branches, and other nonuniform targets. This increased robustness is a critical milestone for micro-robotic platforms, as it directly influences mission viability in natural environments where surfaces lack uniformity and predictability.
The experimental results also highlighted the importance of the timing and coordination between takeoff, hover, and landing stages. By ensuring a brief hover phase before touchdown and by maintaining a controlled lateral movement during the approach, the robot could align its limbs for an effective contact with the landing surface. The underdamped dynamic response of the legs allowed the system to absorb energy efficiently, reducing peak loads and enabling a smoother transition from flight to rest on the surface. In repeated trials, RoboBee successfully landed on the second leaf or an equivalent uneven substrate after a sequence of controlled motions, reinforcing the concept that energy-dissipating, jointed limbs can play a decisive role in achieving stable outcomes on varied surfaces.
The testing environment—with a plant branch included and a motion-capture system tracking precise movements—played a critical role in validating the approach. This setup provided a realistic testbed in which the robot could navigate natural-looking obstacles and surfaces. The data collected under these conditions reinforced the hypothesis that damping mechanisms modeled after natural leg joints could be scaled down to micro-level dimensions and still function effectively. The success across a range of leaf-like substrates demonstrates that the landing system possesses a degree of generality, enabling future exploration of other surface types that RoboBee might encounter in real-world deployments. The results suggest a promising trajectory toward broader application, where reliable contact with a variety of natural surfaces is essential for sustained operation in field studies, environmental monitoring tasks, or pollination-inspired experiments.
While the improvements are substantial, the researchers clearly acknowledge that additional work remains to translate these laboratory successes into fully autonomous outdoor performance. Key next steps involve refining on-board sensing to support real-time decision-making about when and how to initiate landing sequences under changing lighting, wind, and surface conditions. Another set of tasks involves scaling up the landing mechanism for future generations of RoboBee or similar micro-robots, with attention to maintaining the same damping characteristics and reliability as the system size increases. The team also plans to investigate different leg geometries and material choices to optimize damping without compromising weight or energy efficiency. These directions are aimed at ensuring that the landing system remains robust under a wide variety of operational scenarios, ultimately expanding the practical utility of RoboBee in both research contexts and potential real-world applications.
The practical implications of these results extend beyond academic novelty. A robust landing capability can significantly widen the scope of possible missions for micro-robot swarms, enabling them to perform long-term environmental monitoring in forested or densely vegetated environments, conduct disaster surveillance in areas cluttered with debris, or operate as pollination-inspired agents that can interact with flowering plants in a distributed manner. The potential to autonomously land on varied surfaces without human intervention reduces the operational overhead and increases the feasibility of continuous, multi-day missions in challenging terrains. The enhanced landing performance also supports safer and more reliable recharging or data collection cycles, as the vehicle can return to stable ground contact and resume operation after a pause or following a disturbance. While challenges remain, the current results establish a strong foundation for deploying micro-robot swarms in more complex, real-world environments.
In sum, the landing improvements demonstrated in these experiments mark a meaningful step toward robust, autonomous micro-robot operations on uneven surfaces. The combination of crane-fly-inspired limb design, energy-dissipating joints, and controlled approach strategies yields a landing performance that is more reliable, repeatable, and adaptable to diverse substrates. The outcomes provide not only a proof of concept for the biology-inspired strategy but also a practical path forward for engineering refinements, material choices, and control logic that will enable future generations of RoboBee to operate with greater independence in natural settings. This progression lays the groundwork for broader adoption of bio-inspired mechanical solutions in micro-robotics and reinforces the potential for collaborative, swarm-based applications in environmental monitoring, surveillance, and agricultural research.
Technical implications, autonomy potential, and paths forward
The biomechanical landing approach demonstrates several technical implications for the design and operation of micro-robotic systems. First, the integration of compliant, damped joints into the landing gear introduces a pathway to energy management that is particularly valuable at small scales. By dispersing and dissipating kinetic energy through the leg mechanics, the system reduces the peak forces experienced during touchdown, thereby improving stability and reducing wear on propulsion and sensing components. The result is a more robust platform capable of withstanding the repeated contact events that are inherent to landing on natural substrates. This builds a foundation for longer mission durations, more frequent touch-downs, and the ability to handle a wider variety of surfaces without requiring specialized landing pads or controlled environments.
Second, the approach leverages an insightful balance between mechanical design and control strategy. Rather than relying solely on sophisticated onboard processors to compensate for imperfect landings, the system uses physical properties—mass distribution, joint stiffness, and damping—to shape the contact dynamics in a favorable way. This synergy can simplify real-time control requirements and improve reliability, especially in constrained conditions where computational resources are limited or where rapid, robust responses are necessary. The concept reinforces a broader engineering principle: favorable passive dynamics can complement active control to achieve resilient performance in complex environments. It suggests that future micro-robotic systems may benefit from a design philosophy that prioritizes the physical interface with the environment as a first-class performance determinant.
Third, the research emphasizes the importance of testing across multiple scales and surface conditions to ensure generality. The use of leaf-surface experiments, combined with the oscillatory leg tests and free-fall trials, provides a comprehensive view of how the landing system behaves under a variety of stimuli and contact scenarios. This multi-faceted approach helps to identify potential failure modes and refine the design before attempting deployment in more unpredictable outdoor settings. The lessons drawn from these tests will likely inform not only RoboBee’s future iterations but also the broader design considerations for other micro-scale aerial platforms that aspire to operate with autonomy in natural environments.
From a broader perspective, the work contributes to the ongoing dialogue about bio-inspired robotics and the practical translation of natural strategies into engineered systems. It demonstrates that nature’s solutions to energy management, damping, and contact can be appropriated at micro scales to yield tangible improvements in performance. This line of inquiry supports the exploration of more advanced leg geometries, novel materials with tailored damping properties, and the potential integration of lightweight, on-board sensing capable of anticipating surface interactions. The path forward will likely involve iterative refinements of the mechanical design and propulsion control, along with incremental gains in autonomy through miniaturized sensing, computation, and actuation payloads—all aimed at enabling RoboBees to operate effectively in real-world ecosystems without constant human oversight.
The continued development will also address practical integration challenges, including onboard electronics, sensor fusion, and power management, all of which influence the robot’s ability to maintain stable flight after landing and to resume flight efficiently. As the team progresses toward onboard sensing and autonomous decision-making, the balance between mechanical damping and electronic control will become increasingly important. Achieving a seamless combination of these elements will be essential to realizing a fully autonomous, untethered micro-robot system capable of sustained operations in complex, variable environments. The overall trajectory points toward a mature, autonomously operating RoboBee family that can perform repeated landings, transitions, and takeoffs in landscapes that present a mix of leaves, branches, and other irregularities.
Limitations, challenges, and the roadmap to onboard autonomy
Despite the encouraging results, several limitations and challenges remain that will shape the roadmap for onboard autonomy and broader deployment. A central limitation is the current need for safety tethers during experimentation, which, while practical for laboratory testing, impede long-term operational flexibility and the exploration of more expansive mission profiles. Removing these tethers is a fundamental step toward true autonomy, but it must be balanced with rigorous safety protocols and robust failure-handling strategies to prevent damage to the robot and to its surroundings. Real-world deployment will require robust power systems, compact on-board processing units, and advanced sensors capable of perceiving position, orientation, and contact states with high fidelity. Achieving this combination is nontrivial at the insect scale, given constraints on weight, size, and energy density, but it is a critical objective for translating passive damping advantages into a fully autonomous system.
Another challenge relates to the scalability of the landing mechanism. While the current design demonstrates solid performance at the RoboBee scale, expanding the approach to larger micro-robot platforms will demand careful retooling of leg geometry, damping materials, and structural architecture to preserve the essential energy-management benefits. Scaling up must preserve the delicate balance between stiffness, damping, and mass distribution so that the advantages observed at the smaller scale remain intact when system inertia grows. This implies a targeted materials program, possibly exploring advanced polymers or composite joints that offer predictable damping characteristics without imposing prohibitive weight penalties. The roadmap thus includes material optimization, structural redesign for higher mass, and experimentation with different leg configurations to maintain consistent performance across scales.
A further limitation is the current reliance on external measurement systems, such as motion-capture setups, for assessing landing performance. While such measurement modalities are invaluable for controlled experimentation, they are not practical in field settings. Advancing onboard sensing capabilities to detect surface contact, measure leg deflection, and estimate velocity at touchdown is essential for enabling autonomous decision-making and rapid corrective actions in the moment of contact. The integration of compact sensors, such as accelerometers, gyroscopes, and force sensors embedded within the legs, could provide the necessary data streams for real-time control adjustments. Moreover, the development of efficient, energy-aware algorithms for interpreting these signals will be crucial to ensuring that the micro-robot can operate for meaningful durations under power constraints.
The roadmap also envisions exploring multi-robot coordination and swarming behaviors in the context of robust landings. The ability to land reliably on diverse surfaces, combined with onboard autonomy, could enable multiple RoboBees to synchronize landing events, share environmental data during pauses, and resume flight in a coordinated manner. However, achieving reliable inter-robot communication, collision avoidance, and distributed decision-making at micro scales adds layers of complexity that require careful architectural planning for both hardware and software. The team’s ongoing work will likely address these coordination challenges by integrating lightweight networking protocols and robust control algorithms that can operate within the strict energy and processing budgets of insect-scale platforms.
Finally, the long-term vision remains tied to the practical applications of micro-robot swarms in environmental monitoring, disaster response, and pollination-inspired tasks. Demonstrating reliable landing is a foundational capability that supports a broader set of operations, including data collection, sampling, and environment-aware behavior. The research thus frames landing reliability as a stepping-stone toward more ambitious goals: autonomous mission planning, adaptive response to dynamic surroundings, and the ability to function as a distributed sensor network that can operate for extended periods without human intervention. The continued pursuit of onboard autonomy, enhanced sensing, and scalable mechanical designs will determine how quickly these micro-robotic systems transition from laboratory demonstrations to real-world deployments in critical settings.
Conclusion
The development of crane-fly-inspired landing gear for RoboBee represents a meaningful advance in the quest for robust, autonomous micro-robotic platforms. By translating biomechanical principles into a mechanical design that actively dampens and manages energy during touchdown, the research team has achieved more reliable landings on uneven substrates such as leaves. The experimental program—encompassing leg oscillation tests, free-fall trials with inertial dummies, and sequential takeoff–landing sequences in a plant-enriched test arena—has demonstrated that energy absorption and controlled contact dynamics can substantially improve landing stability at insect scale. While the work remains oriented toward autonomous operation in natural environments, the current results establish a strong foundation for onboard sensing integration, higher-level autonomy, and scalable designs that can carry micro-robot swarms into broader practical applications.
Looking ahead, the path forward includes continuing to refine damping mechanisms, exploring advanced leg geometries and materials, and enabling onboard electronics with integrated sensors to support real-time decision-making during contact events. The overarching goal is to reduce or eliminate safety tethers and to advance toward fully autonomous operation that preserves landing reliability across a wider range of surfaces and environmental conditions. If these efforts succeed, RoboBee and its successors could play an important role in environmental monitoring, disaster surveillance, and pollination-inspired robotics, offering new capabilities in places where more traditional aerial systems face significant challenges. The research embodies a forward-looking synthesis of biomechanics, materials science, and control engineering, underscoring how natural principles can inform the design of resilient, scalable micro-robotic systems. In this spirit, the team continues to push the boundaries of what is possible at the insect scale, with a clear focus on practical applications that extend beyond the laboratory and into the real world.