Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. RoboSoft 2025: 23–26 April 2025, LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND ICUAS 2025: 14–17 May 2025, CHARLOTTE, NC ICRA 2025: 19–23 May 2025, ATLANTA, GA London Humanoids Summit: 29–30 May 2025, LONDON IEEE RCAR 2025: 1–6 June 2025, TOYAMA, JAPAN 2025 Energy Drone & Robotics Summit: 16–18 June 2025, HOUSTON, TX RSS 2025: 21–25 June 2025, LOS ANGELES ETH Robotics Summer School: 21–27 June 2025, GENEVA IAS 2025: 30 June–4 July 2025, GENOA, ITALY ICRES 2025: 3–4 July 2025, PORTO, PORTUGAL IEEE World Haptics: 8–11 July 2025, SUWON, KOREA IFAC Symposium on Robotics: 15–18 July 2025, PARIS RoboCup 2025: 15–21 July 2025, BAHIA, BRAZIL RO-MAN 2025: 25–29 August 2025, EINDHOVEN, THE NETHERLANDS CLAWAR 2025: 5–7 September 2025, SHENZHEN World Robot Summit: 10–12 October 2025, OSAKA, JAPAN IROS 2025: 19–25 October 2025, HANGZHOU, CHINA IEEE Humanoids: 30 September–2 October 2025, SEOUL CoRL 2025: 27–30 September 2025, SEOUL Enjoy today’s videos! I love the platform and I love the use case, but this particular delivery method is... Odd? [ RIVR ] This is just the beginning of what people and physical AI can accomplish together. To recognize business value from collaborative robotics, you have to understand what people do well, what robots do well—and how they best come together to create productivity. DHL and Robust.AI are partnering to define the future of human-robot collaboration. [ Robust AI ] Teleoperated robotic characters can perform expressive interactions with humans, relying on the operators’ experience and social intuition. In this work, we propose to create autonomous interactive robots, by training a model to imitate operator data. Our model is trained on a dataset of human-robot interactions, where an expert operator is asked to vary the interactions and mood of the robot, while the operator commands as well as the pose of the human and robot are recorded. [ Disney Research Studios ] Introducing THEMIS V2, our all-new full-size humanoid robot. Standing at 1.6m with 40 DoF, THEMIS V2 now features enhanced 6 DoF arms and advanced 7 DoF end-effectors, along with an additional body-mounted stereo camera and up to 200 TOPS of onboard AI computing power. These upgrades deliver exceptional capabilities in manipulation, perception, and navigation, pushing humanoid robotics to new heights. [ Westwood ] BMW x Figure Update: This isn’t a test environment—it’s real production operations. Real-world robots are advancing our Helix AI and strengthening our end-to-end autonomy to deploy millions of robots. [ Figure ] On March 13, at WorldMinds 2025, in the Kaufleuten Theater of Zurich, our team demonstrated for the first time two autonomous vision-based racing drones. It was an epic journey to prepare for this event, given the poor lighting conditions and the safety constraints of a theater filled with more than 500 people! The background screen visualizes in real-time the observations of the AI algorithm of each drone. No map, no IMU, no SLAM! [ University of Zurich (UZH) ] Unitree releases Dex5 dexterous hand. Single hand with 20 degrees of freedom (16 active+4 passive). Enable smooth backdrivability (direct force control). Equipped with 94 highly sensitive touch points (optional). [ Unitree ] You can say “real world manipulation” all you want, but until it’s actually in the real world, I’m not buying it. [ 1X ] Developed by Pudu X-Lab, FlashBot Arm elevates the capabilities of our flagship FlashBot by blending advanced humanoid manipulation and intelligent delivery capabilities, powered by cutting-edge embodied AI. This powerful combination allows the robot to autonomously perform a wide range of tasks across diverse settings, including hotels, office buildings, restaurants, retail spaces, and healthcare facilities. [ Pudu Robotics ] If you ever wanted to manipulate a trilby with 25 robots, a solution now exists. [ Paper ] via [ EPFL Reconfigurable Robotics Lab ] published by [ IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters ] We’ve been sharing videos from the Suzumori Endo Robotics Lab at the Institute of Science Tokyo for many years, and Professor Suzumori is now retiring. Best wishes to Professor Suzumori! [ Suzumori Endo Lab ] No matter the vehicle, traditional control systems struggle when unexpected challenges—like damage, unforeseen environments, or new missions—push them beyond their design limits. Our Learning Introspective Control (LINC) program aims to fundamentally improve the safety of mechanical systems, such as ground vehicles, ships, and robotics, using various machine learning methods that require minimal computing power. [ DARPA ] NASA’s Perseverance rover captured new images of multiple dust devils while exploring the rim of Jezero Crater on Mars. The largest dust devil was approximately 210 feet wide (65 meters). In this Mars Report, atmospheric scientist Priya Patel explains what dust devils can teach us about weather conditions on the Red Planet. [ NASA ]

This dairy barn is full of cows, as you might expect. Cows are being milked, cows are being fed, cows are being cleaned up after, and a few very happy cows are even getting vigorously scratched behind the ears. “I wonder where the farmer is,” remarks my guide, Jan Jacobs. Jacobs doesn’t seem especially worried, though—the several hundred cows in this barn are being well cared for by a small fleet of fully autonomous robots, and the farmer might not be back for hours. The robots will let him know if anything goes wrong. more frequently than the twice a day at a traditional dairy farm. Not only is getting milked more often more comfortable for the cows, cows also produce about 10 percent more milk when the milking schedule is completely up to them. Jan Jacobs is the human-robot interaction design lead for Lely, a maker of agricultural machinery. Founded in 1948 in Maassluis, Netherlands, Lely deployed its first Astronaut milking robot in the early 1990s. The company has since developed other robotic systems that assist with cleaning, feeding, and cow comfort, and the Astronaut milking robot is on its fifth generation. Lely is now focused entirely on robots for dairy farms, with around 135,000 of them deployed around the world. Essential Jobs on Dairy Farms The weather outside the barn is miserable. It’s late fall in the Netherlands, and a cold rain is gusting in from the sea, which is probably why the cows have quite sensibly decided to stay indoors and why the farmer is still nowhere to be found. Lely requires that dairy farmers who adopt its robots commit to letting their cows move freely between milking, feeding, and resting, as well as inside and outside the barn, at their own pace. “We believe that free cow traffic is a core part of the future of farming,” Jacobs says as we watch one cow stroll away from the milking robot while another takes its place. This is possible only when the farm operates on the cows’ schedule rather than a human’s. “We were spending 6 hours a day milking,” explains dairy farmer Josie Rozum, whose 120-cow herd at Takes Dairy Farm uses a pair of Astronaut A5 milking robots. “Now that the robots are handling all of that, we can focus more on animal care and comfort.”Lely in just 20 to 30 seconds. The actual milking takes only a few minutes, but with the average small dairy farm in North America providing a home for several hundred cows, milking typically represents a time commitment of 4 to 6 hours per day. Cows are happier with continuous access to food, which means feeding them several times a day. The feed is a mix of roughage (hay), silage (grass), and grain. The cows will eat all of this, but they prefer the grain, and so it’s common to see cows sorting their food by grabbing a mouthful and throwing it up into the air. The lighter roughage and silage flies farther than the grain does, leaving the cow with a pile of the tastier stuff as the rest gets tossed out of reach. This makes “feed pushing” necessary to shove the rest of the feed back within reach of the cow. 68 kilograms of manure a day. All that manure has to be collected and the barn floors regularly cleaned. Dairy Industry 4.0 The amount of labor needed to operate a dairy meant that until the early 1900s, most family farms could support only about eight cows. The introduction of the first milking machines, called bucket milkers, helped farmers milk 10 cows per hour instead of 4 by the mid-1920s. Rural electrification furthered dairy automation starting in the 1950s, and since then, both farm size and milk production have increased steadily. In the 1930s, a good dairy cow produced 3,600 kilograms of milk per year. Today, it’s almost 11,000 kilograms, and Lely believes that robots are what will enable small dairy farms to continue to scale sustainably. Lely But dairy robots are expensive. A milking robot can cost several hundred thousand dollars, plus an additional US $5,000 to $10,000 per year in operating costs. The Astronaut A5, Lely’s latest milking robot, uses a laser-guided robot arm to clean the cow’s udder before attaching teat cups one at a time. While the cow munches on treats, the Astronaut monitors her milk output, collecting data on 32 parameters, including indicators of the quality of the milk and the health of the cow. When milking is complete, the robot cleans the udder again, and the cow is free to leave as the robot steam cleans itself in preparation for the next cow. Lely argues that although the initial cost is higher than that of a traditional milking parlor, the robots pay for themselves over time through higher milk production (due primarily to increased milking frequency) and lower labor costs. Lely’s other robots can also save on labor. The Vector mobile robot handles continuous feeding and feed pushing, and the Discovery Collector is a robotic manure vacuum that keeps the floors clean. At Takes Dairy Farm, Rozum and her family used to spend several hours per day managing food for the cows. “The feeding robot is another amazing piece of the puzzle for our farm that allows us to focus on other things.”Takes Family Farm Marcia Endres, a professor in the department of animal science at the University of Minnesota. Endres specializes in dairy-cattle management, behavior, and welfare, and studies dairy robot adoption. “When we first started doing research on this about 12 years ago, most of the farms that were installing robots were smaller farms that did not want to hire employees,” Endres says. “They wanted to do the work just with family labor, but they also wanted to have more flexibility with their time. They wanted a better lifestyle.” added Lely robots to their dairy farm in Ely, Iowa, four years ago. “When we had our old milking parlor, everything that we did as a family was always scheduled around milking,” says Josie Rozum, who manages the farm and a creamery along with her parents—Dan and Debbie Takes—and three brothers. “With the robots, we can prioritize our personal life a little bit more—we can spend time together on Christmas morning and know that the cows are still getting milked.” Takes Family Dairy Farm’s 120-cow herd is milked by a pair of Astronaut A5 robots, with a Vector and three Discovery Collectors for feeding and cleaning. “They’ve become a crucial part of the team,” explains Rozum. “It would be challenging for us to find outside help, and the robots keep things running smoothly.” The robots also add sustainability to small dairy farms, and not just in the short term. “Growing up on the farm, we experienced the hard work, and we saw what that commitment did to our parents,” Rozum explains. “It’s a very tough lifestyle. Having the robots take over a little bit of that has made dairy farming more appealing to our generation.” Takes Dairy Farm about a third of the adoption rate in Europe, where farms tend to be smaller, so the cost of implementing the robots is lower. Endres says that over the last five years, she’s seen a shift toward robot adoption at larger farms with over 500 cows, due primarily to labor shortages. “These larger dairies are having difficulty finding employees who want to milk cows—it’s a very tedious job. And the robot is always consistent. The farmers tell me, ‘My robot never calls in sick, and never shows up drunk.’ ” The Lely Luna cow brush helps to keep cows’ skin healthy. It’s also relaxing and enjoyable, so cows will brush themselves several times a day.Lely much more relaxed and friendly toward people they meet. Rozum agrees. “We’ve noticed a tremendous change in our cows’ demeanor. They’re more calm and relaxed, just doing their thing in the barn. They’re much more comfortable when they can choose what to do.” Cows Versus Robots Cows are curious and clever animals, and have the same instinct that humans have when confronted with a new robot: They want to play with it. Because of this, Lely has had to cow-proof its robots, modifying their design and programming so that the machines can function autonomously around cows. Like many mobile robots, Lely’s dairy robots include contact-sensing bumpers that will pause the robot’s motion if it runs into something. On the Vector feeding robot, Lely product engineer René Beltman tells me, they had to add a software option to disable the bumper. “The cows learned that, ‘oh, if I just push the bumper, then the robot will stop and put down more feed in my area for me to eat.’ It was a free buffet. So you don’t want the cows to end up controlling the robot.” Emergency stop buttons had to be relocated so that they couldn’t be pressed by questing cow tongues. One of the dirtiest jobs on a dairy farm is handled by the Discovery Collector, an autonomous manure vacuum. The robot relies on wheel odometry and ultrasonic sensors for navigation because it’s usually covered in manure.Evan Ackerman Besides maintaining their dominance at the top of the herd, the current generation of Lely robots doesn’t interact much with the cows, but that’s changing, Jacobs tells me. Right now, when a robot is driving through the barn, it makes a beeping sound to let the cows know it’s coming. Lely is looking into how to make these sounds more enjoyable for the cows. “This was a recent revelation for me,” Jacobs says. ”We’re not just designing interactions for humans. The cows are our users, too.” Human-Robot Interaction Last year, Jacobs and researchers from Delft University of Technology, in the Netherlands, presented a paper at the IEEE Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) Conference exploring this concept of robot behavior development on working dairy farms. The researchers visited robotic dairies, interviewed dairy farmers, and held workshops within Lely to establish a robot code of conduct—a guide that Lely’s designers and engineers use when considering how their robots should look, sound, and act, for the benefit of both humans and cows. On the engineering side, this includes practical things like colors and patterns for lights and different types of sounds so that information is communicated consistently across platforms. Jacobs doesn’t want his robots to try to be anyone’s friend—not the cow’s, and not the farmer’s. “The robot is an employee, and it should have a professional relationship,” he says. “So the robot might say ‘Hi,’ but it wouldn’t say, ‘How are you feeling today?’ ” What’s more important is that the robots are trustworthy. For Jacobs, instilling trust is simple: “You cannot gain trust by doing tricks. If your robot is reliable and predictable, people will trust it.” The electrically driven, pneumatically balanced robotic arm that the Lely Astronaut uses to milk cows is designed to withstand accidental (or intentional) kicks.Lely From Dairy Farmers to Robot Managers With the additional time and flexibility that the robots enable, some dairy farmers have been able to diversify. On our way back to Lely’s headquarters, we stop at Farm Het Lansingerland, owned by a Lely customer who has added a small restaurant and farm shop to his dairy. Large windows look into the barn so that restaurant patrons can watch the robots at work, caring for the cows that produce the cheese that’s on the menu. A self-guided tour takes you right up next to an Astronaut A5 milking robot, while signs on the floor warn of Vector feeding robots on the move. “This farmer couldn’t expand—this was as many cows as he’s allowed to have here,” Jacobs explains to me over cheese sandwiches. “So, he needs to have additional income streams. That’s why he started these other things. And the robots were essential for that.” Besides managing the robots, the farmer must also learn to manage the massive amount of data that the robots generate about the cows. “The amount of data we get from the robots is a game changer,” says Rozum. “We can track milk production, health, and cow habits in real time. But it’s overwhelming. You could spend all day just sitting at the computer, looking at data and not get anything else done. It took us probably a year to really learn how to use it.” A Robotic Dairy A: One Astronaut A5 robot can milk up to 60 cows. After the Astronaut cleans the teats, a laser sensor guides a robotic arm to attach the teat cups. Milking takes just a few minutes. C: The Vector robot dispenses freshly mixed food in small batches throughout the day. A laser measures the height of leftover food to make sure that the cows are getting the right amounts. E: As it milks, the Astronaut is collecting a huge amount of data—32 different parameters per teat. If it detects an issue, the farmer is notified, helping to catch health problems early. F: Automated gates control meadow access and will keep a cow inside if she’s due to be milked soon. Cows are identified using RFID collars, which also track their behavior and health. A Sensible Future for Dairy Robots After lunch, we stop by Lely headquarters, where bright red life-size cow statues guard the entrance and all of the conference rooms are dairy themed. We get comfortable in Butter, and I ask Jacobs and Beltman what the future holds for their dairy robots. feed-pushing robot is equipped with lidar and stereo cameras, which allow it to autonomously navigate around large farms without needing to follow a metal strip bolted to the ground. A new overhead camera system will leverage AI to recognize individual cows and track their behavior, while also providing farmers with an enormous new dataset that could allow Lely’s systems to help farmers make more nuanced decisions about cow welfare. The potential of AI is what Jacobs seems most excited about, although he’s cautious as well. “With AI, we’re suddenly going to take away an entirely different level of work. So, we’re thinking about doing research into the meaningfulness of work, to make sure that the things that we do with AI are the things that farmers want us to do with AI.” Lely is aware of this and knows that its robots have to find the right balance between being helpful, and taking over. “We want to make sure not to take away the kinds of interactions that give dairy farmers joy in their work,” says Beltman. “Like feeding calves—every farmer likes to feed the calves.” Lely does sell an automated calf feeder that many dairy farmers buy, which illustrates the point: What’s the best way of designing robots to give humans the flexibility to do the work that they enjoy? Dairy farms are different. Perhaps that’s because the person buying the robot is the person who most directly benefits from it. But I wonder if the concern over automation of jobs would be mitigated if more companies chose to emphasize the sustainability and joy of work equally with profit. Automation doesn’t have to be zero-sum—if implemented thoughtfully, perhaps robots can make work easier, more efficient, and more fun, too. Jacobs certainly thinks so. “That’s my utopia,” he says. “And we’re working in the right direction.”

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hot combs—they all obviously benefited from the jolt of electrification. But the eraser? What was so problematic about the humble eraser that it needed electrifying? 1935 patent application for an apparatus for erasing, “Hand held rubbers are clumsy and cover a greater area than may be required.” Aye, there’s the rub, as it were. Lukowski’s cone-tipped electric eraser, he argued, could better handle the fine detail. Consider the careful technique Roscoe C. Sloane and John M. Montz suggest in their 1930 book Elements of Topographic Drawing. To make a correction to a map, these civil engineering professors at Ohio State University recommend the following steps: With a smooth, sharp knife pick the ink from the paper. This can be done without marring the surface. Place a hard, smooth surface, such as a [drafting] triangle, under the erasure before rubbing starts. When practically all the ink has been removed with the knife, rub with a pencil eraser. Erasing was not for the faint of heart! A Brief History of the Eraser Where did the eraser get its start? The British scientist Joseph Priestley is celebrated for his discovery of oxygen and not at all celebrated for his discovery of the eraser. Around 1766, while working on The History and Present State of Electricity, he found himself having to draw his own illustrations. First, though, he had to learn to draw, and because any new artist naturally makes mistakes, he also needed to erase. In 1766 or thereabouts, Joseph Priestley discovered the erasing properties of natural rubber.Alamy Alas, there weren’t a lot of great options for erasing at the time. For items drawn in ink, he could use a knife to scrape away errors; pumice or other rough stones could also be used to abrade the page and remove the ink. To erase pencil, the customary approach was to use a piece of bread or bread crumbs to gently grind the graphite off the page. All of the methods were problematic. Without extreme care, it was easy to damage the paper. Using bread was also messy, and as the writer and artist John Ruskin allegedly said, a waste of perfectly good bread. Priestley may have discovered this attribute of rubber, but Edward Nairne, an inventor, optician, and scientific-instrument maker, marketed it for sale. For three shillings (about one day’s wages for a skilled tradesman), you could purchase a half-inch (1.27-cm) cube of the material. Priestley acknowledged Nairne in the preface of his 1770 tutorial on how to draw, A Familiar Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Perspective, noting that caoutchouc was “excellently adapted to the purpose of wiping from paper the marks of a black-lead-pencil.” By the late 1770s, cubes of caoutchouc were generally known as rubbers or lead-eaters. What was so problematic about the humble eraser that it needed electrifying? Luckily, there were lots of other people looking for ways to improve natural rubber, and in 1839 Charles Goodyear developed the vulcanization process. By adding sulfur to natural rubber and then heating it, Goodyear discovered how to stabilize rubber in a firm state, what we would call today the thermosetting of polymers. In 1844 Goodyear patented a process to create rubber fabric. He went on to make rubber shoes and other products. (The tire company that bears his name was founded by the brothers Charles and Frank Seiberling several decades later.) Goodyear unfortunately died penniless, but we did get a better eraser out of his discovery. Who Really Invented the Electric Eraser? Albert Dremel, who opened his eponymous company in 1932, often gets credit for the invention of the electric eraser, but if that’s true, I can find no definitive proof. Out of more than 50 U.S. patents held by Dremel, none are for an electric eraser. In fact, other inventors may have a better claim, such as Homer G. Coy, who filed a patent for an electrified automatic eraser in 1927, or Ola S. Pugerud, who filed a patent for a rotatable electric eraser in 1906. The Dremel Moto-Tool, introduced in 1935, came with an array of swappable bits. One version could be used as an electric eraser.Dremel In 1935 Dremel did come out with the Moto-Tool, the world’s first handheld, high-speed rotary tool that had interchangeable bits for sanding, engraving, burnishing, and sharpening. One version of the Moto-Tool was sold as an electric eraser, although it was held more like a hammer than a pencil. Introduction to Cataloging and the Classification of Books. She described a flat, round rubber eraser mounted on a motor-driven instrument similar to a dentist’s drill. The eraser could remove typewriting and print from catalog cards without leaving a rough appearance. By 1937, discussions of electric erasers were part of the library science curriculum at Columbia University. Electric erasers had gone mainstream. To erase pencil, the customary approach was to use a piece of bread to gently grind the graphite off the page. In 1930, the Charles Bruning Co.’s general catalog had six pages of erasers and accessories, with two pages devoted to the company’s electric erasing machine. Bruning, which specialized in engineering, drafting, and surveying supplies, also offered a variety of nonelectrified eraser products, including steel erasers (also known as desk knives), eraser shields (used to isolate the area to be erased), and a chisel-shaped eraser to put on the end of a pencil. Loren Specialty Manufacturing Co. arrived late to the electric eraser game, introducing its first such product in 1953. Held in the hand like a pen or pencil, the Presto electric eraser would vibrate to abrade a small area in need of correction. The company spun off the Presto brand in 1962, about the time the Presto Model 80 [shown at top] was produced. This particular unit was used by officer workers at the New York Life Insurance Co. and is now housed at the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt. The Creativity of the Eraser When I was growing up, my dad kept an electric eraser next to his drafting table. I loved playing with it, but it wasn’t until I began researching this article that I realized I had been using it all wrong. The pros know you’re supposed to shape the cylindrical rubber into a point in order to erase fine lines. Darrel Tank, who specializes in pencil drawings. I watched several of his surprisingly fascinating videos comparing various models of electric erasers. Seeing Tank use his favorite electric eraser to create texture on clothing or movement in hair made me realize that drawing is not just an additive process. Sometimes it is what’s removed that makes the difference. - YouTube Susan Piedmont-Palladino, an architect and professor at Virginia Tech’s Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center, has also thought a lot about erasing. She curated the exhibit “Tools of the Imagination: Drawing Tools and Technologies from the Eighteenth Century to the Present” at the National Building Museum in 2005 and authored the companion book of the same title. Piedmont-Palladino describes architectural design as a long process of doing, undoing, and redoing, deciding which ideas can stay and which must go. Of course, the pencil, the eraser (electric or not), and the computer are all just tools for transmitting and visualizing ideas. The tools of any age reflect society in ways that aren’t always clear until new tools come to replace them. Both the pencil and the eraser had to be invented, and it is up to historians to make sure they aren’t forgotten. Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology. An abridged version of this article appears in the April 2025 print issue as “When Electrification Came for the Eraser.” References The electric eraser, more than any object I have researched for Past Forward, has the most incorrect information about its history on the Internet—wrong names, bad dates, inaccurate assertions—which get repeated over and over again as fact. It’s a great reminder of the need to go back to original sources. As always, I enjoyed digging through patents to trace the history of invention and innovation in electric erasers. Other primary sources I consulted include Margaret Mann’s Introduction to Cataloging and the Classification of Books, a syllabus to Columbia University’s 1937 course on Library Service 201, and the Charles Bruning Co.’s 1930 catalog. Although Henry Petroski’s The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance only has a little bit of information on the history of erasers, it’s a great read about the implement that does the writing that needs to be erased.

A new prototype is laying claim to the title of smallest, lightest untethered flying robot. At less than a centimeter in wingspan, the wirelessly powered robot is currently very limited in how far it can travel away from the magnetic fields that drive its flight. However, the scientists who developed it suggest there are ways to boost its range, which could lead to potential applications such as search and rescue operations, inspecting damaged machinery in industrial settings, and even plant pollination. One strategy to shrink flying robots involves removing their batteries and supplying them electricity using tethers. However, tethered flying robots face problems operating freely in complex environments. This has led some researchers to explore wireless methods of powering robot flight. “The dream was to make flying robots to fly anywhere and anytime without using an electrical wire for the power source,” says Liwei Lin, a professor of mechanical engineering at University of California at Berkeley. Lin and his fellow researchers detailed their findings in Science Advances. 3D-Printed Flying Robot Design Each flying robot has a 3D-printed body that consists of a propeller with four blades. This rotor is encircled by a ring that helps the robot stay balanced during flight. On top of each body are two tiny permanent magnets. All in all, the insect-scale prototypes have wingspans as small as 9.4 millimeters and weigh as little as 21 milligrams. Previously, the smallest reported flying robot, either tethered or untethered, was 28 millimeters wide. When exposed to an external alternating magnetic field, the robots spin and fly without tethers. The lowest magnetic field strength needed to maintain flight is 3.1 millitesla. (In comparison, a refrigerator magnet has a strength of about 10 mT.) When the applied magnetic field alternates with a frequency of 310 hertz, the robots can hover. At 340 Hz, they accelerate upward. The researchers could steer the robots laterally by adjusting the applied magnetic fields. The robots could also right themselves after collisions to stay airborne without complex sensing or controlling electronics, as long as the impacts were not too large. Experiments show the lift force the robots generate can exceed their weight by 14 percent, to help them carry payloads. For instance, a prototype that’s 20.5 millimeters wide and weighing 162.4 milligrams could carry an infrared sensor weighing 110 mg to scan its environment. The robots proved efficient at converting the energy given them into lift force—better than nearly all other reported flying robots, tethered or untethered, and also better than fruit flies and hummingbirds. Currently the maximum operating range of these prototypes is about 10 centimeters away from the magnetic coils. One way to extend the operating range of these robots is to increase the magnetic field strength they experience tenfold by adding more coils, optimizing the configuration of these coils, and using beamforming coils, Lin notes. Such developments could allow the robots to fly up to a meter away from the magnetic coils. The scientists could also miniaturize the robots even further. This would make them lighter, and so reduce the magnetic field strength they need for propulsion. “It could be possible to drive micro flying robots using electromagnetic waves such as those in radio or cell phone transmission signals,” Lin says. Future research could also place devices that can convert magnetic energy to electricity onboard the robots to power electronic components, the researchers add.