Collision Resilient Insect-Scale Soft-Actuated Aerial Robots With High Agility

Abstract

Flying insects are remarkably agile and robust. As they fly through cluttered natural environments, they can demonstrate aggressive acrobatic maneuvers such as backflip, rapid escape, and in-flight collision recovery. Current state-of-the-art subgram microaerial-vehicles (MAVs) are predominately powered by rigid actuators such as piezoelectric ceramics, but they have low fracture strength (120 MPa) and failure strain (0.3%). Although these existing systems can achieve a high lift-to-weight ratio, they have not demonstrated insect-like maneuvers such as somersault or rapid collision recovery. In this article, we present a 665 mg aerial robot that is powered by novel dielectric elastomer actuators (DEA). The new DEA achieves high power density (1.2 kW/kg) and relatively high transduction efficiency (37%). We further incorporate this soft actuator into an aerial robot to demonstrate novel flight capabilities. This insect-scale aerial robot has a large lift-to-weight ratio (>2.2:1) and it achieves an ascending speed of 70 cm/s. In addition to demonstrating controlled hovering flight, it can recover from an in-flight collision and perform a somersault within 0.16 s. This work demonstrates that soft aerial robots can achieve insect-like flight capabilities absent in rigid-powered MAVs, thus showing the potential of a new class of hybrid soft-rigid robots.

Active Sensing for Search and Tracking: A Review

“…From the operational perspective, certain applications (e.g., cooperative localization, surveillance, assistive navigation, exploration and mapping) may require the simultaneous use of robots with actuation and morphological heterogeneity [209]. For instance, smaller platforms have access to narrow passages, but their payload is limited [209]; to solve this issue, it is possible to employ larger robots that carry application-specific payloads (e.g., long-duration batteries, heavy sensors or actuators) [190]. Heterogeneous robotic systems represent a fertile research field, where there are still numerous open questions to be addressed.…”

A High‐Lift Micro‐Aerial‐Robot Powered by Low‐Voltage and Long‐Endurance Dielectric Elastomer Actuators

“…Prior works designed key robot parameters using a scaling analysis. [17,18] While this approach enabled robot flight, the robot aerodynamic efficiency was substantially lower compared with other FWMAVs. In this we derived a degrees-of-freedom (DoFs) quasi-steady aerodynamic model and used the model to aid robot design (see Section S5 in the Supporting Information for details).…”

“…These results represent an over 70% lift increase compared with the best existing soft aerial robot. [ 18 ]…”

RMF-Owl: A Collision-Tolerant Flying Robot for Autonomous Subterranean Exploration

“…Departing from multirotor and broadly rotorcraft designs, the contributions in [22,23] present collision-tolerant fixed-wing designs including bioinspired shape-morphing for higher protection when not flying. Considering flapping-wing designs and miniaturized systems, a set of relevant collision-tolerant systems are presented in [24,25]. Beyond contributions in collision-tolerant aerial robot designs, a set of works focus on specialized autonomy functionalities exploiting impact resilience.…”