CAREER: Towards Integrated Understanding and Informed Mimicry of Insect Flight Mechanics and Control with Application to Micro Air Vehicles

职业：昆虫飞行力学和控制的综合理解和知情模仿及其在微型飞行器中的应用

• 批准号: 1554429
• 负责人: Bo Cheng
• 金额: $ 50万
• 依托单位: Pennsylvania State Univ University Park
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2016-07-01 至 2021-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1554429&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Towards; Integrated; Understanding; Informed

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project focuses on connections between flying insects and innovative micro air vehicle design. Flying insects display agility, endurance and efficiency well beyond what is achievable by any engineered aerial system of similar size. Efforts to understand and reproduce these capabilities are hampered by the challenge of performing controlled experiments on live insects in reasonably natural conditions. This project will use magnetic levitation to study the closed-loop mechanics and control of insect flight with minimal interference from cumbersome mechanical constraints. The principles derived from these studies will not only allow engineering translation of appropriate flapping-wing flight strategies, but also will delimit the regions in which more conventional rotary or fixed wing designs outperform biomimetic approaches. Understanding how flying insects function with integrated sensing and control, but limited computational capabilities will enable development of miniaturized and efficient sensing, and computation technologies for future micro air vehicles. The products of this research, from experiments and high-speed footage of insect flight to robotic insect platforms, will be translated into interactive exhibits for education and outreach, to increase public awareness and interest in science and engineering. Through synergistic integration of novel experimental apparatus and theoretical tools, the flight performance and the underlying dynamics, sensing and control principles of insect flight will be studied with the support of this award. In this process, this research will advance the studies of insect flight with three primary goals: (i) develop a suite of novel experimental apparatus that overcomes the limitations in the conventional tethered and free-flight insect experiments, therefore, enable controlled experiments on live insects engaged in a variety of flight maneuvers; (ii) derive functional models of insect sensorimotor control system, encompassing low-level reflexive control for local stability and high-level control for global maneuverability. Such models will elucidate how insects solve robust flight control problem subjected to unstable flight dynamics and limited neural control resources; (iii) systematically compare the aerodynamic power and efficiency between flapping flight and rotary flight, therefore determining under which condition flapping wing surpasses rotary wing as a more advantageous solution to millimeter-scale micro air vehicles.

该学院早期职业发展（CAREER）项目侧重于飞行昆虫与创新微型飞行器设计之间的联系。飞行昆虫所表现出的敏捷性、耐力和效率远远超出任何类似尺寸的工程飞行系统所能达到的水平。在合理的自然条件下对活体昆虫进行受控实验的挑战阻碍了理解和重现这些能力的努力。该项目将利用磁悬浮研究昆虫飞行的闭环力学和控制，同时将繁琐的机械约束的干扰降至最低。从这些研究中得出的原理不仅可以实现适当的扑翼飞行策略的工程转化，而且还将界定更传统的旋转翼或固定翼设计优于仿生方法的区域。了解飞行昆虫如何通过集成传感和控制但有限的计算能力发挥作用，将有助于为未来微型飞行器开发小型化、高效的传感和计算技术。这项研究的产品，从昆虫飞行的实验和高速镜头到机器人昆虫平台，将被转化为用于教育和推广的互动展览，以提高公众对科学和工程的认识和兴趣。通过新颖的实验装置和理论工具的协同集成，昆虫飞行的飞行性能以及潜在的动力学、传感和控制原理将在该奖项的支持下进行研究。在此过程中，本研究将推进昆虫飞行的研究，并实现三个主要目标：（i）开发一套新颖的实验装置，克服传统系留和自由飞行昆虫实验的局限性，从而能够对活体昆虫进行各种飞行动作的受控实验； (ii) 推导昆虫感觉运动控制系统的功能模型，包括局部稳定性的低级反射控制和全局可操作性的高级控制。这些模型将阐明昆虫如何在飞行动力学不稳定和神经控制资源有限的情况下解决稳健的飞行控制问题； （iii）系统比较扑翼飞行和旋翼飞行的气动功率和效率，从而确定扑翼飞行在什么情况下超越旋翼作为毫米级微型飞行器更有利的解决方案。

项目成果

Flies land upside down on a ceiling using rapid visually mediated rotational maneuvers

• DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aax1877
• 发表时间: 2019-10-01
• 期刊: SCIENCE ADVANCES
• 影响因子: 13.6
• 作者: Liu, Pan;Sane, Sanjay P.;Cheng, Bo
• 通讯作者: Cheng, Bo