Progress on ‘pico’ air vehicles

As the characteristic size of a flying robot decreases, the challenges for successful flight revert to basic questions of fabrication, actuation, fluid mechanics, stabilization, and power, whereas such questions have in general been answered for larger aircraft. When developing a flying robot on the scale of a common housefly, all hardware must be developed from scratch as there is nothing ‘off-the-shelf’ which can be used for mechanisms, sensors, or computation that would satisfy the extreme mass and power limitations. This technology void also applies to techniques available for fabrication and assembly of the aeromechanical components: the scale and complexity of the mechanical features requires new ways to design and prototype at scales between macro and microeletromechanical systems, but with rich topologies and material choices one would expect when designing human-scale vehicles. With these challenges in mind, we present progress in the essential technologies for insect-scale robots, or ‘pico’ air vehicles.