Every moving part a machine has is just another thing that can (and will) eventually fail. So what do you do if you want to maximize longevity and durability? Cut down on those as much as possible, to the absolute minimum, if you can. Take, for example, the Monospinner: a drone with a single moving part.
Obviously a propeller-based flying machine is going to have to have at least one moving part in the form of a prop, but as it turns out, you don't really need anything more than that. Traditional quadcopters use their quartet of propellers to both generate enough lift to haul the drone into the air, and then vary the thrust generated by any one propeller in order to stabilize the whole devicesso that it doesn't flip over or spin out of control.
Designed by researchers Weixuan Zhang, Mark W. Mueller and Raffaello D'Andrea as part of the Flying Machine Arena project, the Monospinner uses its single propeller to fly in a state of carefully controlled chaos. With a lopsided design and single propeller, it can't ever be stable in a traditional sense but through the use of a clever algorithm it can vary the thrust of its propeller from moment to moment in order to maintain a wacky, but stable spin. And through more algorithmic backflips, it can move from place to place just like any quadcopter.
This idea isn't totally new or exclusive to this particular drone. The same sort of algorithmic propeller control can be used on four-prop drones that have had mishaps in-air and are down to three, two, or just one functional propeller. This drone was just designed from the bottom up to fly that way.
It may not be the most majestic thing while in flight, but the simplicity of this design could prove to be a veritable superpower in some situations. Since this drone's sophistication is on the software side, designs like this should prove simple and cheap to make. And although having just a single propeller means that all is lost should that one prop fail, the drone should be effectively immune to mechanical failure otherwise.
It's a weird mix of strength and weakness. A weird mix that's totally in line with this flyer's brilliant, bizarre gyrations of flight.