{"id":219803,"date":"2025-08-10T12:08:03","date_gmt":"2025-08-10T17:08:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/08\/small-but-mighty-a-seed-inspired-monocopter-idea-takes-flight"},"modified":"2025-08-10T12:08:03","modified_gmt":"2025-08-10T17:08:03","slug":"small-but-mighty-a-seed-inspired-monocopter-idea-takes-flight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/08\/small-but-mighty-a-seed-inspired-monocopter-idea-takes-flight","title":{"rendered":"Small but mighty: A seed-inspired monocopter idea takes flight"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/small-but-mighty-a-seed-inspired-monocopter-idea-takes-flight.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>From a seed-inspired design to a 26-minute flight time on a single rotor, a new monocopter developed by SUTD researchers marks a 10-year journey towards redefining how efficient small flying robots can be.<\/p>\n<p>When Singapore celebrated its 50th year of independence in 2015, a team of student researchers led by Associate Professor Foong Shaohui from Singapore University Technology and Design (SUTD) embarked on an ambitious challenge: to design and build a drone capable of 50 minutes of sustained flight.<\/p>\n<p>At the time, most hobbyist quadcopters could barely manage half of that. The SG50 Multi-Rotor Drone project succeeded, but to fly that long, the craft had to be large, complex, and heavy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From a seed-inspired design to a 26-minute flight time on a single rotor, a new monocopter developed by SUTD researchers marks a 10-year journey towards redefining how efficient small flying robots can be. When Singapore celebrated its 50th year of independence in 2015, a team of student researchers led by Associate Professor Foong Shaohui from [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":367,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1488,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-219803","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drones","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/367"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219803"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219803\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}