This Tiny Robot 'Perches' Like An Insect

This tiny robot uses electro-adhesion to "perch" on objects. A Harvard-turned-MIT researcher and his colleagues just dropped some pretty cool Spider-Man tech in the latest issue of Science magazine: surface clinging via "electrostatic adhesion." It's a widely applicable breakthrough that will, for instance, keep future robots perched while they wait for instructions. Flying drones use a lot of energy hovering, but the researchers, who hail from institutes across the U.S. and Hong Kong, may have found the first step in a path to conserving energy during activity. Like birds and insects, drones could save tons of energy if they were able to "perch" instead of hovering, as shown in the video below.