An insect-scale robot is capable of flying, swimming, impulsively taking off from the water surface, and landing.

Jumping can be a very efficient mode of locomotion for small robots to overcome large obstacles and travel in natural, rough terrain. In this paper we present the development and characterization of a novel 5 cm, 7g jumping robot. It can jump obstacles more than 27 times its own size and outperforms existing jumping robots by one order of magnitude with respect to jump height per weight and jump height per size. It employs elastic elements in a four bar linkage leg system to allow for very powerful jumps and adjustment of the jumping force, take-off angle and force profile during the acceleration phase.

Many real-world applications for robots—such as long-term aerial and underwater observation, cross-medium operations, and marine life surveys—require robots with the ability to move between the air-water boundary. Here, we describe an aerial-aquatic hitchhiking robot that is self-contained for flying, swimming, and attaching to surfaces in both air and water and that can seamlessly move between the two. We describe this robot’s redundant, hydrostatically enhanced hitchhiking device, inspired by the morphology of a remora ( Echeneis naucrates ) disc, which works in both air and water. As with the biological remora disc, this device has separate lamellar compartments for redundant sealing, which enables the robot to achieve adhesion and hitchhike with only partial disc attachment. The self-contained, rotor-based aerial-aquatic robot, which has passively morphing propellers that unfold in the air and fold underwater, can cross the air-water boundary in 0.35 second. The robot can perform rapid attachment and detachment on challenging surfaces both in air and under water, including curved, rough, incomplete, and biofouling surfaces, and achieve long-duration adhesion with minimal oscillation. We also show that the robot can attach to and hitchhike on moving surfaces. In field tests, we show that the robot can record video in both media and move objects across the air/water boundary in a mountain stream and the ocean. We envision that this study can pave the way for future robots with autonomous biological detection, monitoring, and tracking capabilities in a wide variety of aerial-aquatic environments.

Collective robotic construction concerns multirobot systems that modify their environment according to high-level user-specified goals.

We present a power and control autonomous, insect-scale legged robot the Harvard Ambulatory MicroRobot with RF communication (HAMR-F). At only 2.8 g and 4.5 cm in length, HAMR-F is capable of locomotion at speeds up to 17.2 cm/s (3.8 body lengths per second) with an onboard battery. Two microcontrollers and custom drive electronics independently control eight high-voltage piezoelectric actuators to enable gait flexibility and maneuverability across a range of stride frequencies. An onboard microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) inertial measurement unit provides feedback for controlled, straight-line running on this size- and weight-constrained mobile microrobot. The main contributions of this letter are: first, the design of lightweight power electronics for independently driving multiple high-voltage (200 V) piezoelectric actuators, second, a detailed characterization of HAMR-F's speed, maneuverability, and cost of transport, and finally, the integration of an onboard feedback controller for straight-line, high-speed running.