2 research outputs found
Bee: A 95-mg Four-Winged Insect-Scale Flying Robot Driven by Twinned Unimorph Actuators
We introduce Bee, a 95-mg four-winged microrobot with improved
controllability and open-loop-response characteristics with respect to those
exhibited by state-of-the-art two-winged microrobots with the same size and
similar weight (i.e., the 75-mg Harvard RoboBee). The key innovation that made
possible the development of Bee is the introduction of an extremely light
(28-mg) pair of twinned unimorph actuators, which enabled the design of a new
microrobotic mechanism that flaps four wings independently. A first main
advantage of the proposed design, compared to those of two-winged flyers, is
that by increasing the number of actuators from two to four, the number of
direct control inputs increases from three to four when simple sinusoidal
excitations are employed. A second advantage of Bee is that its four-wing
configuration and flapping mode naturally damp the rotational disturbances that
commonly affect the yaw degree of freedom of two-winged microrobots. In
addition, the proposed design greatly reduces the complexity of the associated
fabrication process compared to those of other microrobots, as the unimorph
actuators are fairly easy to build. Lastly, we hypothesize that given the
relatively low wing-loading affecting their flapping mechanisms, the life
expectancy of Bees must be considerably higher than those of the two-winged
counterparts. The functionality and basic capabilities of the robot are
demonstrated through a set of simple control experiments.Comment: Accepted for publications in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
(RA-L) and the Proceedings of the 2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on
Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2019). 8 pages, 6 figure
Control of Flying Robotic Insects: A Perspective and Unifying Approach
We discuss the problem of designing and implementing controllers for
insect-scale flapping-wing micro air vehicles (FWMAVs), from a unifying
perspective and employing two different experimental platforms; namely, a
Harvard RoboBee-like two-winged robot and the four-winged USC Bee+. Through
experiments, we demonstrate that a method that employs quaternion coordinates
for attitude control, developed to control quadrotors, can be applied to drive
both robotic insects considered in this work. The proposed notion that a
generic strategy can be used to control several types of artificial insects
with some common characteristics was preliminarily tested and validated using a
set of experiments, which include position- and attitude-controlled flights. We
believe that the presented results are interesting and valuable from both the
research and educational perspectives.Comment: ICAR 201