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.

Dubbed the "Picobug" and inspired by a male stag beetle, the compact, 30-gram robot combines the flight of a Dragonfly quadrotor and the crawl of a DASH robot that allows multiple modes of locomotion. It can fly up to 13 miles per hour and skitter across a 10-foot-long table in 19 seconds. The university's GRASP Laboratory released footage of the little robot scuttling across a flat surface, flying over a cinder block, and traveling through tight spaces by flying and crawling simultaneously. Video by PBS NewsHour, footage provided by the University of Pennsylvania's GRASP Laboratory. "Because of its small size, the Picobug can explore environments that other robots would not be able to access," Yash Mulgaonkar, a researcher at UPenn's GRASP Laboratory, told IEEE Spectrum.

Bipedal walking has worked out pretty well for humans. We're kind of stuck with it until someone comes up with something better. And the really frustrating part is that all kinds of animals have already come up with better ways of getting around: specifically, birds and insects, who use wings to fly as well as legs and feet to walk. This multimodality makes birds and insects inherently versatile and adaptable, which is why you can find them doing quite well just about everywhere. Some of the most versatile and adaptable robots also exhibit multimodal characteristics: they can fly and climb, or jump and glide, or even fly and swim. But flying and walking seems to be by far the most useful combination, as evidenced by the variety of animals that can do it, and researchers at the University of Pennsylvania's GRASP Laboratory have designed a new robot called Picobug that can fly, walk, and even (soon) grab on to stuff.