Asynchronous muscle-like actuation improves flapping wing robot flight stability
Self-excited actuation enables adaptive and resilient flapping-wing flight
Robotics
Summary
Flying insects use two types of muscles to flap their wings: one that contracts when told by the brain and another that can flap wings on its own after being stretched. The authors built the first flapping wing robot that mimics this self-flapping muscle type. This allows the robot’s wings to naturally adjust to changes and react instantly to bumps without needing sensors or commands. Their tests show that this makes the robot fly more steadily and handle obstacles better than robots using traditional muscle control.
What this means in practice
- •For drone developers: Build flapping wing drones that react instantly to collisions without extra sensors, improving stability in cluttered environments.$Commercial implications: This paper enables drone makers to sell more reliable, adaptable flapping wing drones that can navigate obstacles naturally and safely.
- •For robotics engineers: Design robots with actuation that integrates mechanical dynamics and control to improve responsiveness and reduce control system load.
Authors
Rundong Yang, Ethan S. Wold, Ellen Liu, James Lynch, Wei Zhou, Mark Jankauski, Simon Sponberg, Nick Gravish
Abstract
The muscles that power insect flight fall into one of two categories: 1) synchronous muscles that contract under direct control from the nervous system, and 2) asynchronous muscles which have an intrinsic stretch activation response that spontaneously generates wingbeats without the need for signaling from the brain. It is thought that the emergent nature of asynchronous wingbeats provides both adaptive and responsive capabilities for flight control. To date, most flying robots use synchronous actuation. In this paper we develop the first flight-capable flapping wing robot that uses asynchronous actuation. We demonstrate that asynchronous actuation allows wings to respond to changes in the resonant mechanics of the body without control input, and wings can react instantaneously to collisions with obstacles with no extrinsic sensing needed. Flight tests within cluttered environments demonstrate that asynchronous actuation significantly improves stability and performance when compared to synchronous actuation. In total this work demonstrates that a flapping wing robot actuation strategy that emulates the asynchronous muscles of flying insects can provide fast, reactive actuation responses before a control system would need to intervene. This partitioning of embodied control to both the low-level actuation dynamics and and high-level sensorimotor system provides a compelling blueprint for new flying robots.