Tiny insect-like robot can flip, loop and hover for 15 minutes

Tiny insect-like robot can flip, loop and hover for 15 minutes


A small drone powered by soft muscle-like actuators

Kevin Chen

An insect-inspired robot weighing just the same as a raisin can perform acrobatics and fly without breaking for longer periods of time than any previous insect-sized drone.

For small flying robots to perform agile maneuvers, they must be light and agile, but also able to withstand large forces. Such forces mean that most small robots can only fly for about 20 seconds before breaking down, making it difficult to collect enough data to properly calibrate and test a robot’s flying capabilities.

Now, suhaan kim He and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed an insect-like flying robot the size of a postage stamp that can perform acrobatic maneuvers, such as double flips or trace the infinity sign, and can also hover in the air for up to 15 Is. Minutes without fail.

Kim and his team adopted the design of previous flying robots, but they made the joints more flexible by connecting a larger part of the robot rather than just a single failure point. Kim says this reduced the force through the joints by about 100 times. They also used soft actuators such as muscles instead of standard electric motors to move the wings.

“If you only have 20 seconds to fly the robot before it dies, there’s not much we can do to tune the robot when we’re controlling it,” says Kim. “Because of the greatly increased lifetime, we were able to work on controller parts so that the robot could achieve precise trajectory tracking, as well as aggressive maneuvers such as somersaults.”

This tracking meant that the robot could follow complex flight paths, such as tracing letters in the air. Kim says this kind of mobility could eventually be used for things like artificially pollinating plants or inspecting parts of an aircraft that people can’t reach.

However, the robot is currently unable to fly untethered, as the team still has to miniaturize a power source and the electronics that control it — though they hope to improve on this with future designs, Kim says.

“One aspect that isn’t often talked about much is how long the robot will last when you fly it,” says rafael zafari at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the work. “People have focused a lot on battery life and how autonomous we can make it, but no one has really focused too much on how long it will last mechanically, and this paper really I discuss this in detail.”

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