Virtual Drone Controlled by Paralysed Using Invasive BCI

Researchers have developed a device that let a 69-year-old man with paralysis fly a virtual drone using only his thoughts. The BCI decoded the man’s brain activity as he imagined moving three groups of digits in real time. By associating neural signals with the movements of multiple fingers, the work has focused on moving a single computer cursor or whole virtual hand.

The feat offers hope that BCIs could one day help people with paralysis to perform a wider range of activities, such as typing or playing complex video games. The study was inspired by the participant’s own request to use a BCI to fly a drone. He told the researchers that controlling the virtual object was like playing a musical instrument.

More information:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00167-3

Drones with Legs

RAVEN (Robotic Avian-inspired Vehicle for multiple ENvironments) drone, with its bird-inspired legs, can do jumping takeoffs just like crows do, and can use those same legs to get around on the ground pretty well. The drone’s bird-inspired legs adopted some key principles of biological design like the ability to store and release energy in tendon-like springs along with some flexible toes. Multifunctional legs bring RAVEN much closer to birds, and although these mechanical legs are not nearly as complex and capable as actual bird legs, adopting some key principles of biological design allows RAVEN to get around in a very bird-like way.

RAVEN is approximately the size of a crow, with a wingspan of 100 centimeters and a body length of 50 cm. It can walk a meter in just under four seconds, hop over 12 cm gaps, and jump into the top of a 26 cm obstacle. For the jumping takeoff, RAVEN’s legs propel the drone to a starting altitude of nearly half a meter, with a forward velocity of 2.2 m/s. RAVEN’s a 620-gram drone of which a full 230 grams consists of feet and toes and actuators and whatnot. A vision system that could be used for both obstacle avoidance and landing is in the works, as are wings that can fold to allow the drone to pass through narrow gaps.

More information:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/bird-drone

Drones Imitate the Snapshot Memory of Insects

TU Delft researchers took observations from the insect world and apply them to a 56-gram flying drone equipped with a tiny camera and a cheap processor. The researchers created an indoor obstacle course and several snapshots images for the drone to reference. Snapshots were placed with as much distance between them as possible to ensure reduced the number of total images the drone had to store. That, in turn, means the drone required less memory capacity. 

The minimalist drones were able to home-in on a memory-stored snapshot and move from point to point through the course like a chain link before eventually returning to its home base. In the end, the drone was able to successfully travel 100 meters around the course using just 0.65 kiloBytes of memory. All of the visual computing needed for the insect-inspired robot to complete the course occurred on a common microcontroller often found in cheap consumer electronics.

More information:

https://www.popsci.com/technology/drones-ants-memory/