7 accepted papers
Flight is an energetically expensive task. While aerial insects can effortlessly fly through natural environments, achieving power autonomous flights in insect-scale robots remains a major challenge. In prior works, we developed soft-actuated insect-scale aerial robots that demonstrated unique capab…
Aerial insects demonstrate fast and precise heading control when they perform body saccades and rapid escape maneuvers. While insect-scale micro-aerial-vehicles (IMAVs) have demonstrated early results on heading control, their flight endurance and heading angle tracking accuracy remain far inferior…
Light production in natural fireflies represents an effective and unique method for communication and mating. Inspired by bioluminescence, we develop a 650 mg aerial robot powered by four electroluminescent (EL) dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) that have distinct colors and patterns. To enable
The development of whisker-based sensing systems faces at least two important technical challenges: scaling up the number of whiskers to large arrays while retaining a simple interface; and detecting the wide variety of stimuli that biological whiskers can sense, including both direct touch (contact
This work presents the design, fabrication, and characterization of an airflow sensor inspired by the whiskers of animals. The body of the whisker was replaced with a fin structure in order to increase the air resistance. The fin was suspended by a micro-fabricated spring system at the bottom. A per…
Disturbance estimation for Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) is crucial for robustness and safety. In this paper, we use novel, bio-inspired airflow sensors to measure the airflow acting on a MAV, and we fuse this information in an Unscented Kalman filter (UKF) to simultaneously estimate the three-dimens…
This work presents the design, modeling, and fabrication of a whisker-like sensor capable of measuring the whisker's angular displacement as well as the applied moments at the base of the whisker. The sensor takes advantage of readily accessible and low-cost 3D magnetic sensors to transduce whisker…