Building Tomorrow's Robots

When Brandon Araki arrived at MIT in 2015 as a master's candidate in mechanical engineering, he brought along the picobug, a tiny robot that can fly, crawl, and grasp small objects. Before Araki joined Daniela Rus's Distributed Robotics Lab (DRL), he'd been working with collaborators at several universities on the diminutive autonomous machine, which weighs 30 grams and fits in the palm of his hand. He wasn't quite sure what he might do next with the picobug, but when his new boss watched it in action, she was smitten. "I want a hundred of them!" Rus said. Rus, who doubles as the director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), imagines a future packed with autonomous machines capable of flying, driving, performing simple surgeries, and more.