17 accepted papers
Few-shot anomaly detection streamlines and simplifies industrial safety inspection. However, limited samples make accurate differentiation between normal and abnormal features challenging, and even more so under category-agnostic conditions. Large-scale pre-training of foundation visual encoders has…
This letter details the design and validation of a legged terrestrial locomotion system integrated onto a hummingbird-scale flapping wing robot. Two pairs of legs powered by the flight actuators allow forward, reverse, and steering motions while on the ground. Through controlled sinusoidal drive sig
Insects wings are subject to wear and tear from collisions and environmental disturbances during flight. They can tolerate both symmetrical and asymmetrical wing damages while maintaining flight capability to some extent. Drawing inspiration from nature's adaptation capabilities, we investigated the
In this paper, we present a generic fault-tolerant control (FTC) strategy via reinforcement learning (RL). We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method on quadcopter unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The fault-tolerant control policy is trained to handle actuator and sensor fault/attack. Unlike tr…
In this letter, we present the untethered flight of an at-scale tailless hummingbird robot with independently controlled wings. It represents the first untethered stable flight of a two actuator powered bio-inspired Flapping Wing Micro Air Vehicle (FWMAV) in both indoor and outdoor environment. The
Wings of flying animals can not only generate lift and control torques but also can sense their surroundings. Such dual functions of sensing and actuation coupled in one element are particularly useful for small sized bio-inspired robotic flyers, whose weight, size, and power are under stringent con…
Insects and hummingbirds exhibit extraordinary flight performance and can simultaneously master seemingly conflicting goals: stable hovering and aggressive maneuvering, which are unmatched by conventional small scale man-made vehicles. Flapping Wing Micro Air Vehicles (FWMAVs) hold great promise for…
Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) rely on onboard attitude and position sensors for autonomous flight. Due to their size, weight, and power (SWaP) constraints, most modern MAVs use miniaturized inertial measurement units (IMUs) to provide attitude feedback, which is critical for flight stabilization and…
Biological studies show that hummingbirds can perform extreme aerobatic maneuvers during fast escape. Given a sudden looming visual stimulus at hover, a hummingbird initiates a fast backward translation coupled with a 180-degree yaw turn, which is followed by instant posture stabilization in just un…
As a rapidly growing cyber-physical platform, unmanned aerial vehicles are facing more security threats as their capabilities and applications continue to expand. Adversaries with detailed knowledge about the vehicle could orchestrate sophisticated attacks that are not easily detected or handled by…
Unlike conventional aerial vehicles of fixed or rotary wings, realtime on-board attitude estimation of insect or hummingbird scale Flapping Wing Micro Aerial Vehicles (FWMAVs) is very challenging due to the severe instantaneous oscillations (approximately ten times of gravity on our platform) induce…
Flying animals with flapping wings may best exemplify the astonishing ability of natural selection on design optimization by excelling both stability and maneuverability at insect/hummingbird scale. Flapping Wing Micro Air Vehicle (FWMAV) holds great promise in bridging the performance gap between e…
Controlled hovering of motor driven flapping wing micro aerial vehicles (FWMAVs) is challenging due to its limited control authority, large inertia, vibration produced by wing strokes, and limited components accuracy due to fabrication methods. In this work, we present a hummingbird inspired FWMAV w…
Building upon prior work, the development of a scalable high frequency flapping wing robotic test platform is presented. Weighing 4.0 grams and operating at frequencies in excess of 90Hz, the platform is capable of generating a lift-to-weight ratio of approximately 1.3 and demonstrated lift-off teth
Achieving resonance in flapping wings has been recognized as one of the most important principles to enhance power efficiency, lift generation, and flight control performance of high-frequency flapping wing micro air vehicles (MAVs). Most of work on the development of such vehicles have attempted to…
The prominent maneuverability of flapping flight is enabled by rapid and significant changes in aerodynamic forces, which is a result of surprisingly subtle and precise changes of wing kinematics. The high sensitivity of aerodynamic forces to wing kinematic changes demands precise and instantaneous…
A design principle for selecting the stiffness of a wing rotational flexure hinge on bio-inspired flapping wing robots is presented. In this work, a systematic approach of selecting rotational stiffness values such that the primary mode of resonance occurs at harmonics of the wing stroke frequency i…