Insects are quite good at not running into things, and just as good at running into things and surviving, but targeted, accurate precision flight is much more difficult for them. As cute as insects like bees are, there just isn’t enough space in their fuzzy little noggins for fancy sensing and computing systems. Despite their small size, though, bees are able to perform precise flight maneuvers, and it’s a good thing, too, since often their homes are on the other side of holes not much bigger than they are.

Bees make this work through a sort of minimalist brute-force approach to the problem: They fly up to a small hole or gap, hover, wander back and forth a little bit to collect visual information about where the edges of the gap, and then steer themselves through. It’s not fast, and it’s not particularly elegant, but it’s reliable and doesn’t take much to execute.

Reliable and not-taking-much to execute is one way to summarize the focus of the next generation of practical robotics—in other words, robotic platforms that offer affordable real-world autonomy. The University of Maryland’s Perception and Robotics Group has been working on a system that allows a drone to fly through very small and completely unknown gaps using just a single camera and onboard processing. And it’s based on a bee-inspired strategy that yields a success rate of 85 percent.