Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have created a tiny little scurrying robot that resembles a cockroach and can serve as a sort of mini-aircraft carrier for moth-like robots.

Berkeley’s Biomimetic Millisystems Lab have developed a tiny robot that can run fast enough to launch a flying partner robot into the air, according to a TIME report.

The lab has been working on tiny robots that move and sense the world much like animals and insects too, calling them millibots. This newest one, VelociRoACH, has another robot, H2Bird, strapped to it via a harness which it can then toss into the air after getting some speed on the ground.

It’s not just a project for fun, either, as researchers believe that getting multiple robots with different capabilities to work together could open up a whole word of possibilities and make robots more efficient. Rather than try to design all the capabilities into one robot, which is difficult, it makes more sense to develop robots with specialized capabilities that can work together.

By placing H2Bird on top of VelociRoACH, it cuts the cost of transporting the robo-roach by 16 percent, which would be useful if both robots had to reach a point that is 80 meters away and the H2Bird has to fly 20 meters by air. A cooperative team of robots would be much more efficient than independence in this case.

Both robots are remote controlled, and the next step will be to figure out a way to make them autonomous, allowing them to not only act efficiently but “think” on their own as well.

The robots certainly have the performance aspect down, as another version of the robo-roach that is called X2-VelociRoACH is currently the fastest robot out there relative to size — it can get up to 11 miles per hour at full speed, according to the report.

VelociRoACH opens up some pretty wild possibilities for the future of robotics. It would be able to sneak around on the ground conducting surveillance and then send off a moth-sized robot to fly around to get aerial surveillance, making it a very versatile asset.

But designing one robot that can do both those things has proved to be a tricky problem, which is why Berkeley figured that perhaps the best way is to have two robots working in tandem.

And Berkeley researchers found a pretty unique way of doing it. For one thing, they didn’t go the typical route of trying to give the roach straight legs or wheels, which have their own limitations, but rather six C-shaped legs that allows it to handle uneven terrain at a very high speed.

The mini-roach-robot weighs just 32 grams and the H2Bird “ornithopter” that it carries weighs 13.2 grams. VelociRoACH doesn’t quite reach speeds as fast as the X-2, which hit 4.9 meters per second, but it can go 2.7 meters per second with H2Bird on its back, which is a high enough speed to launch it.