The elytra of beetles feature a naturally evolved sandwich structure that offers a lightweight and protective function, especially effective against falling object impacts in complex environments. Consequently, structures mimicking the design of beetle elytra hold potential applications in fields requiring resistance to low-speed impacts, such as civil automotive and aviation industries. This study investigates the impact resistance of two beetle-inspired sandwich plates, end- trabecular beetle elytron plates (EBEP) and grid beetle elytron plates (GBEP), comparing their performance with widely used honeycomb plates (HP) and grid plates (GP). Utilizing 3D printing technology and environmentally friendly polylactic acid (PLA) as the material, samples of these four types of sandwich plates were integrally fabricated and tested under a 10 J impact energy to assess their impact response, damage mode, and characteristics. The results showed that, compared to HP and GP, the average peak force of EBEP and GBEP increased by 29.38% and 17.06%, respectively. Additionally, GBEP's impact resistance indicators, including specific energy absorption (SEA), were 2.9% to 5.4% higher than those of GP, with maximum peak force (MPF), mean compressive force (Fm), and crush force efficiency (CFE) increasing by 5.0%, 24.5%, and 17.8%, respectively. For EBEP, apart from a slight decrease in CFE (2.6%), SEA was 7.8% to 9.2% higher than HP's, while MPF and Fm increased by 18.2% and 15.2%, respectively. Furthermore, damage analysis revealed that the central residual indentation depth of HP was 640% greater than that of EBEP, and GP's was 63.1% greater than that of EBEP. These experimental results validate that beetle plates have significant advantages in load-bearing capacity and impact resistance.