MIT and EPFL's puffin-like robot swims, then flaps out of the water into flight

The New York Times flagged a research robot that does what puffins already do: swim underwater, break the surface, and keep flying on the same pair of wings. The clearer technical write-up is from MIT News. Engineers at MIT and EPFL call it a flapping-wing aerial-aquatic vehicle (FAAV). Results appear in the journal Science (July 9, 2026).

Lead author Raphael Zufferey, who runs MIT's AURA Lab, wants a cheap way for oceanographers and coastal teams to fly out, dive for a sample or sensor reading, then fly the data back without sending a crewed boat into awkward water.

How the FAAV works

The platform is bird-shaped and light: a central fuselage, two flexible membrane wings, and a steerable tail. Total mass stays under 300 grams (about half a pound). A waterproof motor drives a crankshaft that flaps the wings; hydrophobic nanoparticles help the membranes shed water. Wings and tails can be swapped for different sizes. In tank and Lake Geneva tests, the team settled on medium wings around 80 cm tip to tip.

Reported performance matches diving-bird ballparks:

• Swim: nearly 1 m/s at about 5 flaps per second
• Fly: around 6 m/s at a similar flap rate
• Water-to-air exit: steep ~70° pitch so wingtips clear the surface; steeper and it tips back in

Unexpected for bird watchers: the robot leaves the water without paddling feet. Real puffins and ducks often kick; Zufferey's team showed wing size, flap rate, and tail pitch can be enough on a robot. Details and paper links sit on the MIT News story.

What still needs work

This is a lab and lake prototype, not a product you can order. Next steps Zufferey cites include wings that can turn as well as flap, plus tests in choppy water and wind. Autonomy, sampling hardware, and multi-hour field routes are ambitions, not shipped features. Battery-range talk in secondary coverage (a few kilometers of flight or a couple kilometers of swim on one charge) should be treated as lab estimates until the team publishes field endurance data you can reproduce.

What this means for HomeBotRadar

FAAV is not joining the HomeBotRadar catalog. It is research hardware for ocean sensing, not a home or companion robot. We cover it because mainstream science press (NYT, NPR, New Atlas) keeps putting bird-scale multimodal mobility in front of home-robot readers who already watch zoomorphic and specialty platforms.

If you want robots that actually live indoors today, stick to the catalog and companion pets such as aibo, Loona, or MarsCat. Our news hub will keep picking up research stories when they clarify what real robots can and cannot do yet outside the living room.