Researchers have been monitoring how flies land upside down on ceilings and other horizontal surfaces in order to develop drones to move in a similar way. Drones have multiple uses when it comes to the emergency services, agriculture and surveillance, however the major problem with this technology at the moment is that the majority of models only have a battery life of approximately half an hour. The reason for this research is primarily to allow the drones to rest by landing on different surfaces and therefore conserving power.
They found that the only way to effectively carry out this research is to put several flies in a box and disturb them regularly, watching how they land with high-speed video. Watching them land on all sides of the box gave the researchers a good insight into how to transfer the landings to drones.