A gyroscope-free visual-inertial flight control and wind sensing system for 10-mg robots
A gyroscope-free visual-inertial flight control and wind sensing system for 10-mg robots
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DOI：
10.1126/scirobotics.abq8184
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发表时间：
2022-11
期刊：
影响因子：
25
通讯作者：
Sawyer B. Fuller;Zhitao Yu;Yash P. Talwekar
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Sawyer B. Fuller;Zhitao Yu;Yash P. Talwekar
20世纪80年代首次提出了重量仅有几毫克的微型“蚋式机器人”。如果它像一只小昆虫一样悬停，如何使其稳定的问题尚未得到解决。挑战包括传感器既要质量小又要带宽高，以及硅微机械速率陀螺仪太重。能够进行受控悬停的最小机器人使用的传感器组件重达数百毫克。在此，我们证明了加速度计或许是在满足飞行机器人的极小尺寸、速度、重量和功率限制的情况下稳定飞行的最直接方式，即使其缩小到仅有几毫克。随着飞行器尺寸减小，尺度物理规律决定了气动阻力与质量的比率会增加。这导致加速度计空速测量中的噪声降低。我们通过对一个30克机器人的模拟和实验表明，一个2毫克的现成加速度计原则上能够稳定一个10毫克的机器人，尽管传感器本身噪声较大。受果蝇（Drosophila melanogaster）飞行控制器中风 - 视觉感官融合的启发，我们随后添加了一个微型摄像头以及高效的、受苍蝇启发的基于自相关的视觉处理，使机器人能够估计和抵御风，并使用卡尔曼滤波器控制其姿态和飞行速度。我们这种受生物学启发的方法在一架小型飞行直升机上得到了验证，其对阵风的响应与果蝇相当，并且对于一个10毫克的飞行器（重量小于一粒米）来说足够小巧和高效。
描述：一种视觉 - 惯性飞行控制和风感知系统对于一个10毫克的空中机器人来说足够小巧和高效。
Tiny “gnat robots,” weighing just a few milligrams, were first conjectured in the 1980s. How to stabilize one if it were to hover like a small insect has not been answered. Challenges include the requirement that sensors be both low mass and high bandwidth and that silicon-micromachined rate gyroscopes are too heavy. The smallest robot to perform controlled hovering uses a sensor suite weighing hundreds of milligrams. Here, we demonstrate that an accelerometer represents perhaps the most direct way to stabilize flight while satisfying the extreme size, speed, weight, and power constraints of a flying robot even as it scales down to just a few milligrams. As aircraft scale reduces, scaling physics dictates that the ratio of aerodynamic drag to mass increases. This results in reduced noise in an accelerometer’s airspeed measurement. We show through simulation and experiment on a 30-gram robot that a 2-milligram off-the-shelf accelerometer is able in principle to stabilize a 10-milligram robot despite high noise in the sensor itself. Inspired by wind-vision sensory fusion in the flight controller of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, we then added a tiny camera and efficient, fly-inspired autocorrelation-based visual processing to allow the robot to estimate and reject wind as well as control its attitude and flight velocity using a Kalman filter. Our biology-inspired approach, validated on a small flying helicopter, has a wind gust response comparable to the fruit fly and is small and efficient enough for a 10-milligram flying vehicle (weighing less than a grain of rice). Description A visual-inertial flight control and wind sensing system is small and efficient enough for a 10-milligram aerial robot.