A little over a year ago, we wrote about some clumsy-looking but really very clever research from Vijay Kumar's lab at the University of Pennsylvania. That project showed how small drones with just protective cages and simple sensors can handle obstacles by simply running into them, bouncing around a bit, and then moving on. The idea is that you don't have to bother with complex sensors when hitting obstacles just doesn't matter, which bees figured out about a hundred million years ago. Over the past year, Yash Mulgaonkar, Anurag Makineni, and Luis Guerrero-Bonilla (all in Kumar's lab) have come up with a bunch of different ways in which smashing into obstacles can actually be a good and useful thing. From making maps to increased agility to (mostly) on purpose payload deployment, running into stuff and bouncing off again can somehow do it all.