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Fruit flies move over. A new flying robot called DelFly has flapping wings and can dodge a swatting hand with as much agility as a fruit fly.

DelFly has two thin plastic wings on each side of its body, inspired by a fruit fly. Though it’s 55 times bigger than an actual fruit fly, DelFly can do all the same aerial acrobatics. It can even perform 360-degree flips – a move flies never seem to do.

Flies perform agile evasive motion when trying to escape a threat, such as a predator or an incoming flyswatter. One particularly nimble move they perform is called a banked turn, and involves tilting their bodies to perform a sharp change in direction. Performing this motion requires sophisticated sensory and motor controls of flies, which scientists are yet to fully understand.

Matěj Karásek at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and his colleagues used DelFly to test potential flight control strategies used by fruit flies. The robot was preprogramed to use similar wing movements and body rotation patterns of real fruit flies as captured by high-speed cameras in previous research.

DelFly can help researchers gain insights into insect flight control, says Matěj Karásek, who led the work. One area that robotics is helping is why flies continue to drift sideways after a banked turn. It was thought that this drift was undesirable to fruit flies, because they appear to lose control over their flight trajectory and initially DelFly did the same.

However, the team were able to remove this sideways drift by adjusting DelFly’s head orientation to align with its body right after a turn. Surprisingly this tweak didn’t actually impact DelfFly’s turning speed or agility, suggesting that there is no need for flies to avoid drifting.

“Fruit flies either don’t care — they just want to escape as fast as possible — or they still want to keep looking at the danger,” says Karásek.

Next, the team aim to make DelFly fully autonomous, so that it can fly without human pilots.