Squeezing the Limits of Autonomy: Flight Control for the RoboBee

Abstract

As the characteristic size of a flying robot decreases, the challenges for successful flight revert to basic questions of fabrication, actuation, fluid mechanics, stabilization, and power — whereas such questions have in general been answered for larger aircraft. When developing a robot on the scale of a housefly, all hardware must be developed from scratch as there is nothing “off-the-shelf” which can be used for mechanisms, sensors, or computation that would satisfy the extreme mass and power limitations. With these challenges in mind, this talk will present progress in the essential technologies for insect-scale robots and the latest flight experiments with robotic insects.