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

An insect-inspired robot that is only overweight as a raisin can perform acrobatics and fly longer than any previous insect-shaped drones without falling.

In order to perform agile exercises for small flying robots, they need to be mild and agile, but are also able to understand large forces. Such forces mean that most small robots can fly for about 20 seconds before breaking, making it difficult to collect sufficient data to properly calibrate and test the robot’s flight capabilities.

Now, Suhan Kim At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and their colleagues have developed an insect -like flying robot about the size of a postage stamp that can execute an acar Can hover in Minutes without failure.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szxea0qf69i

Kim and his team optimized the design from the previous flying robot, but they made the joints more flexible by connecting a larger part of the robot than just a failure point. Kim says that it reduces the force through the joints by a factor of about 100. He also used soft actuators like muscle to move wings instead of standard electric motors.

Kim says, “If you have only 20 seconds to blow the robot before you die, it’s not that we can tune when controlling the robot,” Kim says. “By increasing lifetime, we were able to work on the control parts so that robot could get accurate trajectory tracking, plus aggressive exercises such as somarasolts.”

This tracking meant that the robot could follow complex flight paths, such as detecting letters in the air. Kim states that such mobility can be used for things such as observing artificially polluting plants or parts of the aircraft.

However, the robot is currently unable to fly unwanted flying, as the team has so far controlled it to shorten a power source and the electronics that controls it – although they expect to improve it with future designs Are, Kim says.

“One aspect that often does not talk much about how long the robot will last when you blow it,” Rafael Zaferi At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who were not involved in work. “People have focused a lot on battery life and we can make it so autonomous, but no one has really focused too much that how long it will run mechanically, and this paper goes into really detail Is.”