Robot insect flies, lands and crawls up vertical walls

A research team from Nanjing University of Aeronautics & Astronautics (NUAA) has designed an insect-like robot that can fly with flapping wings, land on and climb vertical walls. The robot insect can also start again from the wall.

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Flapping wing robots struggle with the fact that they don’t generate a lot of lift to be able to carry higher loads. They are also more difficult to control in the air than systems powered by rotors. The transition from flight to a vertical position in order to be able to land on a wall and to be able to crawl up it on different surfaces is correspondingly difficult. It is a challenge to build a climbing function into such a robot.

Land on vertical walls like an insect

However, a team of engineers at NUAA succeeded, as the researchers write in the study “An Aerial–Wall Robotic Insect That Can Land, Climb, and Take Off from Vertical Surfaces,” published in the journal Research. According to them, the flapping wing robot they developed is able to land on walls made of different materials and with different textures and even crawl up them.

“Insects can both fly in the air and climb walls, benefiting from their agile control of wing flapping and posture. They use wing, leg and visual information to coordinate takeoff and landing,” says Aihong Ji, director of the research project. “The lift generated by the wing flaps is directed upwards when the insect is hovering, while the posture can be changed at will. Especially when landing on a wall or taking off from a wall, a series of complex modular actions must be performed, including the slowing down and rotating the body through a large angle.”

However, the researchers attached the climbing legs to the top of the robot. The force of the flying part, which consists of flapping wings and two rotors, can not only absorb the aerodynamic vacuum for the climbing part, but also the overturning moment caused by gravity. The key to the transition between flight and landing on a vertical wall is sufficient control force and the torque generated.

In order to make the transition from flight to landing and from takeoff to flight, the actuators must be controlled in a coordinated manner. The robot can land on a vertical wall and take off again within 6.1 seconds. It only needs 0.4 seconds to land and 0.7 seconds to take off. The robot uses adhesive pads to hold onto the wall, which it can climb at a speed of up to 6 cm/s.

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(olb)

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