CAREER: Towards Integrated Understanding and Informed Mimicry of Insect Flight Mechanics and Control with Application to Micro Air Vehicles

职业：昆虫飞行力学和控制的综合理解和知情模仿及其在微型飞行器中的应用

• 批准号: 1554429
• 负责人: Bo Cheng
• 金额: $ 50万
• 依托单位: Pennsylvania State Univ University Park
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2016-07-01 至 2021-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1554429&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Towards; Integrated; Understanding; Informed

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project focuses on connections between flying insects and innovative micro air vehicle design. Flying insects display agility, endurance and efficiency well beyond what is achievable by any engineered aerial system of similar size. Efforts to understand and reproduce these capabilities are hampered by the challenge of performing controlled experiments on live insects in reasonably natural conditions. This project will use magnetic levitation to study the closed-loop mechanics and control of insect flight with minimal interference from cumbersome mechanical constraints. The principles derived from these studies will not only allow engineering translation of appropriate flapping-wing flight strategies, but also will delimit the regions in which more conventional rotary or fixed wing designs outperform biomimetic approaches. Understanding how flying insects function with integrated sensing and control, but limited computational capabilities will enable development of miniaturized and efficient sensing, and computation technologies for future micro air vehicles. The products of this research, from experiments and high-speed footage of insect flight to robotic insect platforms, will be translated into interactive exhibits for education and outreach, to increase public awareness and interest in science and engineering. Through synergistic integration of novel experimental apparatus and theoretical tools, the flight performance and the underlying dynamics, sensing and control principles of insect flight will be studied with the support of this award. In this process, this research will advance the studies of insect flight with three primary goals: (i) develop a suite of novel experimental apparatus that overcomes the limitations in the conventional tethered and free-flight insect experiments, therefore, enable controlled experiments on live insects engaged in a variety of flight maneuvers; (ii) derive functional models of insect sensorimotor control system, encompassing low-level reflexive control for local stability and high-level control for global maneuverability. Such models will elucidate how insects solve robust flight control problem subjected to unstable flight dynamics and limited neural control resources; (iii) systematically compare the aerodynamic power and efficiency between flapping flight and rotary flight, therefore determining under which condition flapping wing surpasses rotary wing as a more advantageous solution to millimeter-scale micro air vehicles.

这个教师早期职业发展（职业）项目的重点是飞行昆虫与创新的微型空中汽车设计之间的联系。飞行的昆虫表现出敏捷性，耐力和效率，远远超出了任何类似大小的工程空中系统所能实现的。在合理自然条件下对活昆虫进行受控实验的挑战，阻碍了理解和再现这些能力的努力。该项目将使用磁性悬浮来研究闭环力学和控制昆虫飞行的控制，而繁琐的机械约束干扰最少。这些研究得出的原理不仅将允许工程翻译的适当拍打翼飞行策略，而且还将界定更常规的旋转或固定机翼设计优于仿生方法的区域。了解飞行昆虫如何通过集成感应和控制功能运作，但计算能力有限将能够开发微型和有效的感应，以及用于未来微型航空车辆的计算技术。这项研究的产物，从昆虫飞行的实验和高速录像到机器人昆虫平台，将被转化为互动式展览，以进行教育和外展，以提高公众对科学和工程学的意识和兴趣。通过新型实验设备和理论工具的协同整合，飞行性能和潜在的动态，将在该奖项的支持下研究昆虫飞行的传感和控制原理。在此过程中，这项研究将通过三个主要目标来推进对昆虫飞行的研究：（i）开发一套新型的实验设备，以克服传统的束缚和自由飞行的昆虫实验的局限性，因此，对从事各种飞行动作的活昆虫进行了受控的实验； （ii）得出昆虫感觉运动控制系统的功能模型，包括用于局部稳定性的低级反身控制和全球可操作性的高级控制。这样的模型将阐明昆虫如何解决受到不稳定飞行动态和有限神经控制资源的强大飞行控制问题； （iii）系统地比较了拍打飞行与旋转飞行之间的空气动力和效率，因此确定条件下拍翼超过旋转机翼，这是对毫米规模的微型空气车的更有利的解决方案。

项目成果

Flies land upside down on a ceiling using rapid visually mediated rotational maneuvers

• DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aax1877
• 发表时间: 2019-10-01
• 期刊: SCIENCE ADVANCES
• 影响因子: 13.6
• 作者: Liu, Pan;Sane, Sanjay P.;Cheng, Bo
• 通讯作者: Cheng, Bo