Micro-drones with winches can open doors and lift 40 times their own weight

Micro-drones are nifty little things: small, fast, and agile. But they are not strong machines around, and are barely capable of exerting more force than a small mouse head-butting your ankle. Until now. Scientists from Stanford University and EPFL in Switzerland have created a micro-drone with a built-in winch that's capable of lifting up to 40 times its own weight and performing simple mechanical tasks like opening a door.

The key to the design is the use of interchangeable adhesives on the drone's base: microspines for digging into stucco, carpet, or rubble, and ridged silicone. Both microspines and silicone ridges only cling to surfaces in one direction, meaning they can be easily detached. With these in place, the micro-drones can pull out their 100-gram weight, exerting 40 pounds of force or enough to lift four kilograms (about eight pounds).

The design was inspired by nature, says Matthew Estrada, a PhD candidate at Stanford's Biomimetics and Dexterous Manipulation Lab and co-author on the paper. The team looked to small flying insects as the closest equivalent to micro-drones, and studied how they were able to move ahead.

"Wasps quite often will want to grab wide prey and move back to their den," Estrada told The Verge. Aim, if they do not have enough muscle to fly their cargo "These winch-equipped micro-drones – named FlyCroTugs – work exactly the same way.

What can you do with a machine like this, though? Well, opening doors is one thing, although Estrada notes that when the team tried this was a difficult process. They had to hook up the door and take it easy. "It was challenging in that a number of things had to go right," says Estrada.

But, this is just a proof of concept, and the basic idea that we can create micro-drones that do not just fly around spaces but also manipulate them is enticing. Squads of cheap, disposable micro-drones could work together in the future, clearing rubble for larger robots in disaster scenarios for example.

"More, if you look at the most small flying things, they're interacting with their environment through these mechanisms all the time: they're perching, climbing, dragging things along," Estrada says. Micro-drones are now learning the same skills.