Challenges and Opportunities for Insect-Scale Autonomous Aerial Robots
Kevin Chen Associate Professor, MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Flapping-wing flight at the insect scale is incredibly challenging. Insect muscles not only power flight but also absorb in-flight collisional impact, making these tiny flyers simultaneously agile and robust. In contrast, existing aerial robots have not demonstrated these properties. Rigid robots are fragile against collisions, while soft-driven systems suffer from limited speed, precision, and controllability. In this talk, I will describe our effort in developing a new class of bio-inspired micro-flyers, ones that are powered by high bandwidth soft actuators and equipped with rigid appendages. We constructed the first heavier-than-air aerial robot powered by soft artificial muscles, which can demonstrate a 1000-second hovering flight. In addition, our robot can recover from in-flight collisions and perform somersaults within 0.10 seconds. This work demonstrates for the first time that soft aerial robots can achieve agile and robust flight capabilities absent in rigid-powered micro-aerial vehicles, thus showing the potential of a new class of hybrid soft-rigid robots. I will also discuss our recent progress in incorporating onboard sensors, electronics, and batteries.