9 accepted papers
Small-scale terrestrial robots have a number of applications where operation in confined spaces is required. Because of their low mass (less than five grams) and small size (less than five centimeters), their mechanical design requires careful analysis of multiple subsystems (e.g., actuation, power,…
Countless underwater robots seek to monitor aquatic environments while minimizing their impact on fragile ecosystems. At mm-scales, these systems can be used in a range of waterways, from shallow streams and rivers, to larger ponds and lakes, and navigate around large obstacles or through tight spac
Vision is an important component of robotic perception systems due to the rich information provided by high resolution image sensors, but computer vision algorithms can be computationally expensive and ill-suited to resource-constrained robotic systems. Here, we present a mm-scale vision system capa
Robots are especially useful in cold, remote, and inhospitable environments such as polar regions and extraterrestrial settings. Due to subfreezing temperatures and limited resources in these environments, robots made of ice are particularly advantageous. In this paper we demonstrate how the solid a…
Several insect species are able to locomote across the air-water interface by leveraging surface tension to remain above the water surface. A subset of these insects, such as the stonefly and waterlily beetle, flap their wings to actively move around the two dimensional surface — a locomotion strate…
Here we present HAMR-Jr, a 22.5mm, 320mg quadrupedal microrobot. With eight independently actuated degrees of freedom, HAMR-Jr is, to our knowledge, the most mechanically dexterous legged robot at its scale and is capable of high-speed locomotion (13.91bodylengthss-1) at a variety of stride frequenc…
Flapping-wing micro-aerial vehicles rely on subtle changes in the kinematics of high-frequency wing flapping to produce roll, pitch, and yaw torques. To generate yaw torque, the Harvard RoboBee changes the ratio of upstroke to downstroke speed (“split-cycling”) by applying a second harmonic to the f…
Onboard vision sensing is a current challenge in micro-scale robotics. Small flapping-wing robots such as the RoboBee present significant constraints on power, weight, and image quality for an onboard vision sensor. Here we report the integration of a 1 × 1 × 1.7 mm camera capable of video capture i…
Here we present a suite of theoretical, computational, and experimental studies culminating in the first aerial and aquatic capable insect-scale robot. We develop a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation to model fluid-wing interaction in air and water. From CFD and a system dynamics analysis…