Often, when it comes to flying robots, scientists will look to forms from nature for inspiration. Building robots that fly like birds or insects makes sense, as do robots that mimic the flight methods of helicopters or airplanes. After all, everyone draws inspiration from the things they know, and for scientists trying to master flight in new ways, the best way to start is often looking to the skies and taking a cue from the old.

However, according to a new article from Discovery, New York University’s Leif Ristroph is looking to a new inspiration for his take on the flying robot. Instead of modeling his new robots off of natural flight models, he is using the anti-gravitational models of the sea to change things up. Ristroph wanted to design an aerodynamic robot while keeping size and weight down. The solution, he found, was in the movements of jellyfish.

The aerodynamic model of Ristroph’s new robot lands somewhere between jellyfish and moth. The robot flaps four wings – located, as Discovery states, around where the robot’s waste would be – and the device is able to hover and float as a result.

So why couldn’t Ristroph take inspiration from a more commonplace flying creature – a fly or some other insect, for instance? Apparently, mimicking the flight patterns and models of insects is a notoriously difficult task, not because their wings are difficult to recreate in a larger form, but because flies and other insects actually have extremely sophisticated brains.

Ristroph has noted that flies and other flying insects are unstable and are only really able to maintain levitation due to a plethora of finely tuned alterations executed in the brain. And while such meticulous detail may work just fine for the fly, it doesn’t work so well for robotics. Ristroph would have had an extremely hard time had he tried to condense the sophisticated brain model of a fly down to a size and weight that a flying robot could carry. Hence the switch to a jellyfish model.

Since jellyfish technically don’t have brains and move in a very simplistic fashion, they are arguably the ideal model for flying robots to mimic. The robotic device still isn’t autonomous – Ristroph has to have it tethered to a power source for it to maintain flight – and it isn’t large by any means either, weighing in at two grams. Still, Ristroph will present his new robot at this week’s meeting for the APS Physics Division of Fluid Dynamics, with hopes that his innovative jellyfish model will spark conversation among the robotics community.

Here’s the video via New Scientist: