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

这个教师早期职业发展（CAREER）项目的重点是飞行昆虫和创新的微型飞行器设计之间的联系。飞行昆虫表现出的敏捷性、耐力和效率远远超过任何类似大小的工程航空系统。在合理的自然条件下对活昆虫进行受控实验的挑战阻碍了理解和再现这些能力的努力。该项目将使用磁悬浮来研究昆虫飞行的闭环力学和控制，并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使适当的扑翼飞行策略的工程翻译，而且还将划定更传统的旋转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的传感和控制功能，但有限的计算能力将使未来微型飞行器的小型化和高效的传感和计算技术的发展成为可能。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，将转化为教育和宣传的互动展览，以提高公众对科学和工程的认识和兴趣。通过新型实验仪器和理论工具的协同整合，将在该奖项的支持下研究昆虫飞行的飞行性能和基本动力学，传感和控制原理。在此过程中，本研究将推进昆虫飞行的研究，主要有三个目标：（1）开发一套新的实验装置，克服传统的束缚和自由飞行昆虫实验的局限性，从而使控制实验的活体昆虫从事各种飞行机动;（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自反控制和全局机动性的高级控制。这些模型将阐明昆虫如何解决鲁棒飞行控制问题受到不稳定的飞行动力学和有限的神经控制资源;（iii）系统地比较扑翼飞行和旋转飞行之间的气动功率和效率，从而确定在何种条件下扑翼超过旋转翼作为一个更有利的解决方案毫米级微型飞行器。

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.