A small drone powered by soft muscle-like actuators
Kevin Chen
An a robot inspired by insects that weighs as much as a raisin can perform aerobatics and can fly for much longer without crashing than any previous insect-sized drone.
In fact little flying robots In order to maneuver easily, they must be light and fast, but also able to withstand great forces. The forces mean that most small robots can only fly for about 20 seconds before breaking, making it difficult to collect enough data to properly calibrate and test the robots’ flying capabilities.
now, Suhan Kim At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and colleagues, they have developed an insect-like flying robot the size of a postage stamp that can perform acrobatic maneuvers such as double flips or trace an infinity sign, and can hover up to 15 feet in the air. minute without fail.
Kim and his team adapted the design of an earlier flying robot, but made the joints more elastic, connecting them over a larger part of the robot rather than at a single point of failure. This reduced the force through the joints by a factor of about 100, says Kim. They also used soft muscle-like actuators to move the wings, rather than standard electric motors.
“If you only have 20 seconds to fly the robot before it dies, then there’s not as much tuning to do when we control the robot,” says Kim. “Because of the dramatic increase in lifespan, we were able to work on the controller parts so that the robot can achieve accurate trajectory tracking, as well as aggressive maneuvers such as jumping.”
This tracking meant that the robot could follow complex flight paths, such as tracing letters in the air. That maneuverability could eventually be used to artificially pollinate plants or inspect parts of airplanes that people can’t reach, say Kim.
However, the robot currently cannot fly untethered because the team has yet to miniaturize a power source and the electronics that control it, although they hope to improve on that with future designs, Kim says.
“One aspect that is often not talked about much is how long the robot would last when you fly it,” he says. Raphael Zufferey at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the work. “People have focused a lot on battery life and how autonomous we could be, but no one focused too much on how long it would last mechanically, and this paper goes into that in detail.”
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