Control of Flying Robotic Insects: A Perspective and Unifying Approach

TL;DR

This paper explores a unifying control approach for insect-scale flying robots, demonstrating that quaternion-based attitude control methods from quadrotors can be adapted to different robotic insect platforms through experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a generic control strategy applicable to various robotic insects, validated through experiments on two different platforms, advancing the design of insect-scale micro air vehicles.

Findings

Quaternion-based control can be applied to different robotic insects.

A unified control approach simplifies design across platforms.

Experimental validation shows successful position and attitude control.

Abstract

We discuss the problem of designing and implementing controllers for insect-scale flapping-wing micro air vehicles (FWMAVs), from a unifying perspective and employing two different experimental platforms; namely, a Harvard RoboBee-like two-winged robot and the four-winged USC Bee+. Through experiments, we demonstrate that a method that employs quaternion coordinates for attitude control, developed to control quadrotors, can be applied to drive both robotic insects considered in this work. The proposed notion that a generic strategy can be used to control several types of artificial insects with some common characteristics was preliminarily tested and validated using a set of experiments, which include position- and attitude-controlled flights. We believe that the presented results are interesting and valuable from both the research and educational perspectives.