A Cyborg Insect Reveals a Function of a Muscle in Free Flight

Abstract

While engineers put lots of effort, resources, and time in building insect scale micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) that fly like insects, insects themselves are the real masters of flight. What if we would use living insect as platform for MAV instead? Here, we reported a flight control via electrical stimulation of a flight muscle of an insect-computer hybrid robot, which is the interface of a mountable wireless backpack controller and a living beetle. The beetle uses indirect flight muscles to drive wing flapping and three major direct flight muscles (basalar, subalar, and third axilliary (3Ax) muscles) to control the kinematics of the wings for flight maneuver. While turning control was already achieved by stimulating basalar and 3Ax muscles, electrical stimulation of subalar muscles resulted in braking and elevation control in flight. We also demonstrated around 20 degrees of contralateral yaw and roll by stimulating individual subalar muscle. Stimulating both subalar muscles lead to an increase of 20 degrees in pitch and decelerate the flight by 1.5 m/s2 as well as an induce in elevation of 2 m/s2.

Biohybrid robots: recent progress, challenges, and perspectives

“…Many existing cyborg fabrication approaches rely on time-intensive manual fabrication of small electronic payloads and surgical implantation of these payloads on the organism at the heart of the cyborg biohybrid robot [140,151,192,193]. Future research on cyborg fabrication should consider whether fabrication approaches should and can be scaled up, and whether modular systems can be used among multiple species.…”

Automatic Holonomic Mobile Micromanipulator for Submillimeter Objects Inspired by the Rhinoceros Beetle

“…The miniaturization of insect-inspired biorobotic technology holds considerable promise for achieving insect-comparable efficiency, energy conservation, and collaborative operations. [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27] Mobile manipulation also plays a crucial role in the context of flexible and self-reconfigurable robotic factories. [28][29][30][31] Precision stages have undergone extensive research to enhance positional accuracy.…”

Intelligent Insect–Computer Hybrid Robot: Installing Innate Obstacle Negotiation and Onboard Human Detection onto Cyborg Insect

“…The earliest studies of insect control were demonstrated by Holzer et al and Moore et al in the late 20th century. [24,25] Latest development in insect-computer hybrid robots includes locomotion advancement such as free flight control of beetle with motion capture feedback [26,27] or walking control of beetle [28] and cockroach with integrated sound sensors. [29] Their low mass and volume, further enhanced by their intrinsic ability to walk, fly, and sense the surrounding environment, make them suitable candidates for the task of penetrating and navigating inside complex environments to search for a target.…”