Control of Flying Robotic Insects: A Perspective and Unifying Approach
This work addresses control challenges for robotic insects, offering a potentially unifying approach, though it appears incremental as it adapts an existing method to new platforms.
The paper tackles the problem of designing controllers for insect-scale flapping-wing micro air vehicles by applying a quaternion-based attitude control method, originally developed for quadrotors, to two robotic insect platforms, demonstrating its effectiveness in position- and attitude-controlled flights.
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.