Science Daily May 23, 2023
A team of researchers in the US (UCLA, industries, Washington State University) has developed a
an insect-scale flying robot, Bee ++, driven by four independently actuated flapping wings using new method for synthesizing and implementing high-performance six-degree-of-freedom (6 -DOF) flight controllers. Each wing of the Bee ++ was installed with a preset orientation enabling reliable roll, pitch, and yaw torque generation, and a Lyapunov-based nonlinear control architecture that enabled closed-loop position and attitude regulation and tracking. The control algorithms stabilize position and attitude by independently varying the wing stroke amplitudes of the four flapping wings. The aerodynamic design of the Bee ++ is compatible with a great variety of control structures and performance objectives. They presented the first set of experimental data demonstrating sustained and robust high-performance tracking of a 6 -DOF reference signal during flight at the insect scale. Using data obtained through a series of systematic flight tests, they showed that the Bee ++ can achieve the highest 6 -DOF performance recorded for an insect-scale flapping-wing flying robot during sustained flight… read more. TCHNICAL ARTICLEÂ