Collision Resilient Insect-Scale Soft-Actuated Aerial Robots With High Agility

TLDR

Flying insects exhibit remarkable agility, performing acrobatic maneuvers such as backflips and collision recovery, while current sub‑gram MAVs use rigid piezoelectric actuators with low fracture strength and cannot replicate these insect‑like flight capabilities. The authors aim to demonstrate an insect‑scale aerial robot powered by dielectric elastomer actuators. The 665‑mg robot incorporates soft DEA actuators to achieve high power density and efficiency, enabling novel flight capabilities. The robot achieves 1.2 kW/kg power density, 37 % efficiency, a lift‑to‑weight ratio >2.2:1, ascends at 70 cm/s, and can hover, recover from collisions, and perform a 0.16 s somersault, demonstrating insect‑like agility beyond rigid‑actuator MAVs.

Abstract

Flying insects are remarkably agile and robust. As they fly through cluttered natural environments, they can demonstrate aggressive acrobatic maneuvers such as backflip, rapid escape, and in-flight collision recovery. Current state-of-the-art subgram microaerial-vehicles (MAVs) are predominately powered by rigid actuators such as piezoelectric ceramics, but they have low fracture strength (120 MPa) and failure strain (0.3%). Although these existing systems can achieve a high lift-to-weight ratio, they have not demonstrated insect-like maneuvers such as somersault or rapid collision recovery. In this article, we present a 665 mg aerial robot that is powered by novel dielectric elastomer actuators (DEA). The new DEA achieves high power density (1.2 kW/kg) and relatively high transduction efficiency (37%). We further incorporate this soft actuator into an aerial robot to demonstrate novel flight capabilities. This insect-scale aerial robot has a large lift-to-weight ratio (>2.2:1) and it achieves an ascending speed of 70 cm/s. In addition to demonstrating controlled hovering flight, it can recover from an in-flight collision and perform a somersault within 0.16 s. This work demonstrates that soft aerial robots can achieve insect-like flight capabilities absent in rigid-powered MAVs, thus showing the potential of a new class of hybrid soft-rigid robots.