CAREER: Bio-inspired Automatic Control of a Flying Robotic Insect

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The goal of this research is to extract principles of insect flight control and apply them to the stabilization and navigation of a flying robotic insect. Flying insects, and in particular flies, employ a flight control paradigm that is dramatically different from man-made aircraft. While typical fixed-wing aircraft are passively stable in flight, flies exploit unstable flight dynamics to achieve rapid maneuvers. Specialized sensory organs act in concert with small control muscles locally to stabilize the insect. Other sensor information (visual information, for example) can suppress these local feedback loops to initiate rapid turns. The research approach will elucidate the principles of insect flight control in an engineering context and use these to develop a new paradigm for control of an agile vehicle. This will be based upon multiple combinations of sensors and actuators operating high-speed control loops. This research will merge biological observation and experimentation with fly-like robots in a highly-empirical approach. Deliverables include rules for synthesizing insect-inspired flight controllers, models of controller performance, and a demonstration of a robotic fly capable of controlled hovering (with a power tether) using these techniques.This research is a critical step towards the eventual creation of small and agile autonomous robots. Applications for such devices include search and rescue, hazardous environment exploration, reconnaissance, planetary exploration, environmental monitoring, and traffic monitoring. The multidisciplinary nature of this research will serve to broadly educate graduate and undergraduate students and high school science teachers who will participate in this work. Moreover, throughout the course of this work, robotic insects will be used as examples in a new interactive web-based forum aimed at exciting young students and encouraging them to study science and engineering.