Insect-like flying robots

In recent years, there has been heightened interest in developing mm-scale flying vehicles, both for at-scale studies of insect flight and collective behaviors, and for applications in environmental monitoring, structural repair, search & rescue, and archaeological studies. However, at such small scales it is difficult to obtain sufficient system performance to allow for autonomous operation. In this talk we will describe several advances for the Harvard “RoboBee” platform (an 80-mg flapping-wing vehicle) over the past five years that are bringing this goal closer to reality, including non-linear resonance modeling, multi-wing designs, and scaling analysis. These advances contributed to the sustained untethered flight of a 90-mg four-wing vehicle carrying 170 mg of electronics and solar cells. While still lacking onboard control and sensing, this vehicle demonstrated thrust-per-muscle-mass and system thrust-efficiency matching that of typical biological counterparts such as bees, and the modeling framework shows promise for surpassing these metrics in the future.