🤖 AI Summary
Insect-scale tailless flapping-wing robots suffer from poor yaw stability due to the absence of dedicated yaw control surfaces, and conventional flapping configurations often induce lift asymmetry. Method: This work proposes a lightweight (1.52 g), tailless design featuring four pairs of tilted wings driven directly by piezoelectric actuators, with adjustable wing incidence enabling active yaw moment generation. Contribution/Results: To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of adaptive yaw stabilization—replacing conventional LQI control—in a sub-2 g, transmission-free, tailless flapping-wing robot. The design achieves an optimal trade-off between structural simplicity and dynamic responsiveness. Numerical simulations and tethered flight experiments confirm effective suppression of yaw drift, validating the feasibility of controllable flight for tailless flapping-wing robots powered by sub-10 g batteries.
📝 Abstract
Insect-scale micro-aerial vehicles, especially, lightweight, flapping-wing robots, are becoming increasingly important for safe motion sensing in spatially constrained environments such as living spaces. However, yaw control using flapping wings is fundamentally more difficult than using rotating wings. In this study, an insect-scale, tailless robot with four paired tilted flapping wings (weighing 1.52 g) to enable yaw control was fabricated. It benefits from the simplicity of a directly driven wing actuator with no transmission and a lift control signal; however, it still has an offset in the lift force. Therefore, an adaptive controller was designed to alleviate the offset. Numerical experiments confirm that the proposed controller outperforms the linear quadratic integral controller. Finally, in a tethered and controlled demonstration flight, the yaw drift was suppressed by the wing-tilting arrangement and the proposed controller. The simple structure drive system demonstrates the potential for future controlled flights of battery-powered, tailless, flapping-wing robots weighing less than 10 grams.