College students have made a drone that swims like a fish and flies like a falcon

A hybrid drone that swims like a fish and flies like a falcon?

That’s not sci-fi – that’s the work of some extremely talented college students.

A group of Danish undergrads just built a hybrid drone that flips between the sky and the water without skipping a beat.

It might be the most fun-looking rescue tool no one’s using yet.

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The smoothest air-to-sea transition we’ve ever seen

This isn’t the first hybrid drone, but it might be the slickest. 

The real magic is in the variable pitch propellers, which literally change angle depending on where the drone is: air or water. 

High pitch in the sky for more lift, low pitch underwater for less drag.

And the test footage of the drone that swims says it all. 

The drone lifts off beside a pool, nose-dives into the water, swims below the surface, then erupts straight back into the air. No edits, no CGI. Just engineering that works.

And it’s all student-built. 

The team at Aalborg University modeled the whole craft, 3D-printed the frame, engineered the propeller mechanism, and programmed it with custom code. 

And every bit of it was designed to prove a simple idea: that one drone can thrive in both air and water, no overcomplicated gimmicks required.

And while hybrid drones have existed before – Rutgers made one back in 2015, and a Chinese team showed off a similar move in 2023 – none of them moved quite like this. 

No bulky wing retractions or awkward transitions. Just one seamless bounce between two worlds.

So where do you send a drone that swims?

This thing may have started as a thesis project, but the potential use cases are very real: military recon, search and rescue, marine biology, and infrastructure inspection. 

Basically anywhere you want a scout that can fly in, dive under, and fly back out again without needing a rescue mission of its own.

Even better – it was made with relatively low-cost tools and widely available tech, opening it to the possibility of fast scalability.

No word yet on whether this turns into a commercial product, but honestly, it doesn’t need to. The prototype already proves more than any lab pitch or glossy demo reel ever could.

It swims. It flies. It just works.

And what these students pulled off? It’s more than impressive – it’s a legit breakthrough that deserves real attention.

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