Chinese Military Shows Off Fly-Sized Drones for Covert Ops

When it comes to robotics, nobody's doing it quite like China.

Despite not truly industrializing until the 1950s — some 75 years after the United States — the nation has surged to the global forefront of robotics development. Between 2022 and 2023, China installed over half of all global robotics installed throughout the globe, scoring the second-highest annual robot deployment ever recorded — a close runner up to its own previous record, which it set between 2021 and 2022.

Since then, the sector has only grown. China now boasts over 450,000 individual robotics firms, according to the state-run China Daily. Of that, a Morgan Stanley analysis notes, drones are set to dominate China's robotics production by 2028.

Researchers at the National University of Defense Technology (HUDT), China's top military R&D academy, just showed off a suite of new military UAVs, including a mosquito-sized nanobot measuring just 1.3 cm across.

Featuring two tiny wings and three razor-thin legs, the pea-sized gadget is nearly undetectable to the naked eye, according to the South China Morning Post.

"Miniature bionic robots like this one are especially suited to information reconnaissance and special missions on the battlefield," the student researcher presenting the bot said during a state media appearance, pinching the device between two fingers.

Though developed by a military research center, Interesting Engineering notes that drones of this type also have huge potential for use in fields like medical science, environmental monitoring, and disaster response.

Along with the bug-sized bot, Chinese state media unveiled a handful of other devices, including a four-winged military drone controlled via smartphone, and another that can be fired via a 155 mm artillery shell, making it capable of split-second deployment to sites over 6 miles away.

Though details like production cost and flight time are unknown — not to mention details about its battery, a detail that tends to bedevil extremely small robotics — the barrage of innovation shows that China is rapidly catching up to western weapons tech firms.

Other players in the tiny-drone race include the US-made Teledyne Black Hornet 4, which features three cameras and roughly 30 minutes of flight time, and the Vantage Robotics Trace, which also boasts half an hour of flight time and a maximum operating range of 2km. Notably, however, those "nano UAVs," as their companies advertise them, are measured in inches — not centimeters.

How quickly the new drones might make it into China's regular arsenal is difficult to say. Last November, Chinese military engineers showed off a "drone mothership" capable of transporting 100 UAVs over 4,000 miles at a time. That 11-ton behemoth is set to join China's drone arsenal by the end of June.

If that's any benchmark, we could expect to see the nano drones in the hands of the Peoples Liberation Army as soon as 2026.

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