Related papers: Controlled Flight of an Insect-Scale Flapping-Wing…
While engineers put lots of effort, resources, and time in building insect scale micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) that fly like insects, insects themselves are the real masters of flight. What if we would use living insect as platform for MAV…
The flight of biological butterflies represents a unique aerodynamic regime where high-amplitude, low-frequency wingstrokes induce significant body undulations and inertial fluctuations. While existing tailless flapping-wing micro air…
Achieving short-distance flight helps improve the efficiency of humanoid robots moving in complex environments (e.g., crossing large obstacles or reaching high places) for rapid emergency missions. This study proposes a design of a flying…
Autonomous landing on sloped terrain poses significant challenges for small, lightweight spacecraft, such as rotorcraft and landers. These vehicles have limited processing capability and payload capacity, which makes advanced deep learning…
This work briefly covers our efforts to stabilize the flight dynamics of Northeastern's tailless bat-inspired micro aerial vehicle, Aerobat. Flapping robots are not new. A plethora of examples is mainly dominated by insect-style design…
Tiny flying robots hold great potential for search-and-rescue, safety inspections, and environmental monitoring, but their small size limits conventional sensing-especially with poor-lighting, smoke, dust or reflective obstacles. Inspired…
State estimation and control is a well-studied problem in conventional aerial vehicles such as multi-rotors. But multi-rotors, while versatile, are not suitable for all applications. Due to turbulent airflow from ground effects,…
Tried-and-true flapping wing robot simulation is essential in developing flapping wing mechanisms and algorithms. This paper presents a novel application-oriented flapping wing platform, highly compatible with various mechanical designs and…
Here we report the first sub-milligram flapping wing vehicle which is able to mimic insect wing kinematics. Wing stroke amplitude of 90$^\circ$ and wing pitch amplitude of 80$^\circ$ is demonstrated. This is also the smallest wing-span…
This paper presents a data-driven optimal control policy for a micro flapping wing unmanned aerial vehicle. First, a set of optimal trajectories are computed off-line based on a geometric formulation of dynamics that captures the nonlinear…
With the emergence of new flapping-wing micro aerial vehicle (FWMAV) designs, a need for extensive and advanced mission capabilities arises. FWMAVs try to adapt and emulate the flight features of birds and flying insects. While current…
While bio-inspired and biomimetic systems draw inspiration from living materials, biohybrid systems incorporate them with synthetic devices, allowing the exploitation of both organic and artificial advantages inside a single entity. In the…
We present the first decentralized multi-copter flock that performs stable autonomous outdoor flight with up to 10 flying agents. By decentralized and autonomous we mean that all members navigate themselves based on the dynamic information…
Approximately half of the existing winged-insect species are of very small size (wing length about 0.3-4 mm); they are referred to as miniature insects. Yet until recently, much of what we know about the mechanics of insect flight was…
Bird strikes present a huge risk for aircraft, especially since traditional airport bird surveillance is mainly dependent on inefficient human observation. Computer vision based technology has been proposed to automatically detect birds,…
Achieving both agile maneuverability and high energy efficiency in aerial robots, particularly in dynamic wind environments, remains challenging. Conventional thruster-powered systems offer agility but suffer from high energy consumption,…
Inverted landing is a routine behavior among a number of animal fliers. However, mastering this feat poses a considerable challenge for robotic fliers, especially to perform dynamic perching with rapid body rotations (or flips) and landing…
Aerial manipulation combines the versatility and speed of flying platforms with the functional capabilities of mobile manipulation, which presents significant challenges due to the need for precise localization and control. Traditionally,…
We present the design of an insect-sized jumping microrobot measuring 17mm$\times$6mm$\times$14mm and weighing 75 milligrams. The microrobot consumes 6.4mW of power to jump up by 8mm in height. The tethered version of the robot can jump 6…
Flapping-wing insects, birds, and robots are thought to offset the high power cost of oscillatory wing motion by using elastic elements for energy storage and return. Insects possess highly resilient elastic regions in their flight anatomy…