{"id":20071,"date":"2021-03-03T12:54:16","date_gmt":"2021-03-03T07:09:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/?p=20071"},"modified":"2021-03-03T12:54:21","modified_gmt":"2021-03-03T07:09:21","slug":"new-generation-of-tiny-agile-drones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/new-generation-of-tiny-agile-drones\/","title":{"rendered":"New generation of tiny, agile drones"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

CAMBRIDGE, Mass(MIT News Office<\/em>) —\u00a0If you\u2019ve ever swatted a mosquito away from your face, only to have it return again (and again and again), you know that insects can be remarkably acrobatic and resilient in flight. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those traits help them navigate the aerial world, with all of its wind gusts, obstacles, and general uncertainty. Such traits are also hard to build into flying robots, but MIT Assistant Professor Kevin Yufeng Chen has built a system that approaches insects\u2019 agility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Chen, a member of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Research Laboratory of Electronics, has developed insect-sized drones with unprecedented dexterity and resilience. The aerial robots are powered by a new class of soft actuator, which allows them to withstand the physical travails of real-world flight. Chen hopes the robots could one day aid humans by pollinating crops or performing machinery inspections in cramped spaces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chen\u2019s work appears this month in the journal IEEE Transactions on Robotics<\/a><\/em>. His co-authors include MIT PhD student Zhijian Ren, Harvard University PhD student Siyi Xu, and City University of Hong Kong roboticist Pakpong Chirarattananon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Typically, drones require wide open spaces because they\u2019re neither nimble enough to navigate confined spaces nor robust enough to withstand collisions in a crowd. \u201cIf we look at most drones today, they\u2019re usually quite big,\u201d says Chen. \u201cMost of their applications involve flying outdoors. The question is: Can you create insect-scale robots that can move around in very complex, cluttered spaces?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Chen, \u201cThe challenge of building small aerial robots is immense.\u201d Pint-sized drones require a fundamentally different construction from larger ones. Large drones are usually powered by motors, but motors lose efficiency as you shrink them. So, Chen says, for insect-like robots \u201cyou need to look for alternatives.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The principal alternative until now has been employing a small, rigid actuator built from piezoelectric ceramic materials. While piezoelectric ceramics allowed the first generation of tiny robots to take flight<\/a>, they\u2019re quite fragile. And that\u2019s a problem when you\u2019re building a robot to mimic an insect \u2014 foraging bumblebees endure a collision about once every second.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chen designed a more resilient tiny drone using soft actuators instead of hard, fragile ones. The soft actuators are made of thin rubber cylinders coated in carbon nanotubes. When voltage is applied to the carbon nanotubes, they produce an electrostatic force that squeezes and elongates the rubber cylinder. Repeated elongation and contraction causes the drone\u2019s wings to beat \u2014 fast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chen\u2019s actuators can flap nearly 500 times per second, giving the drone insect-like resilience. \u201cYou can hit it when it\u2019s flying, and it can recover,\u201d says Chen. \u201cIt can also do aggressive maneuvers like somersaults in the air.\u201d And it weighs in at just 0.6 grams, approximately the mass of a large bumble bee. The drone looks a bit like a tiny cassette tape with wings, though Chen is working on a new prototype shaped like a dragonfly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Building insect-like robots can provide a window into the biology and physics of insect flight, a longstanding avenue of inquiry for researchers. Chen\u2019s work addresses these questions through a kind of reverse engineering. \u201cIf you want to learn how insects fly, it is very instructive to build a scale robot model,\u201d he says. \u201cYou can perturb a few things and see how it affects the kinematics or how the fluid forces change. That will help you understand how those things fly.\u201d But Chen aims to do more than add to entomology textbooks. His drones can also be useful in industry and agriculture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chen says his mini-aerialists could navigate complex machinery to ensure safety and functionality. \u201cThink about the inspection of a turbine engine. You\u2019d want a drone to move around [an enclosed space] with a small camera to check for cracks on the turbine plates.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other potential applications include artificial pollination of crops or completing search-and-rescue missions following a disaster. \u201cAll those things can be very challenging for existing large-scale robots,\u201d says Chen. Sometimes, bigger isn\u2019t better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you\u2019ve ever swatted a mosquito away from your face, only to have it return again (and again and again), you know that insects can be remarkably acrobatic and resilient in flight. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20072,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-it","category-techbiz"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/tiny-drones.jpg",900,600,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/tiny-drones-200x200.jpg",200,200,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/tiny-drones-600x400.jpg",600,400,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/tiny-drones-768x512.jpg",750,500,true],"large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/tiny-drones-675x450.jpg",675,450,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/tiny-drones.jpg",900,600,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/tiny-drones.jpg",900,600,false],"ultp_layout_landscape_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/tiny-drones.jpg",900,600,false],"ultp_layout_landscape":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/tiny-drones.jpg",855,570,false],"ultp_layout_portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/tiny-drones.jpg",600,400,false],"ultp_layout_square":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/tiny-drones.jpg",600,400,false],"newspaper-x-single-post":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/tiny-drones-760x490.jpg",760,490,true],"newspaper-x-recent-post-big":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/tiny-drones-550x360.jpg",550,360,true],"newspaper-x-recent-post-list-image":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/tiny-drones-95x65.jpg",95,65,true],"web-stories-poster-portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/tiny-drones.jpg",640,427,false],"web-stories-publisher-logo":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/tiny-drones.jpg",96,64,false],"web-stories-thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/tiny-drones.jpg",150,100,false]},"author_info":{"info":["RevoScience"]},"category_info":"IT<\/a> Tech<\/a>","tag_info":"Tech","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20071"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20071\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}