3D Printed Bio-Inspired Hair Sensor for Directional Airflow Sensing

Rajasekaran, Keshav; Bae, Hyung Dae; Bergbreiter, Sarah; Yu, Miao

doi:10.1109/iros45743.2020.9340711

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…The fruit fly uses a sense of airspeed derived from the Johnson's Organs of its antennae, which detect deflections induced by wind (50). Wind sensors that are small enough or could conceptually be reduced in size to suit a NAT robot have been previously demonstrated but are not available off the shelf (51)(52)(53)(54)(55).…”

Section: An Airspeed Sensor Using An Accelerometermentioning

confidence: 99%

A gyroscope-free visual-inertial flight control and wind sensing system for 10-mg robots

Fuller

Talwekar

2022

Sci. Robot.

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Tiny “gnat robots,” weighing just a few milligrams, were first conjectured in the 1980s. How to stabilize one if it were to hover like a small insect has not been answered. Challenges include the requirement that sensors be both low mass and high bandwidth and that silicon-micromachined rate gyroscopes are too heavy. The smallest robot to perform controlled hovering uses a sensor suite weighing hundreds of milligrams. Here, we demonstrate that an accelerometer represents perhaps the most direct way to stabilize flight while satisfying the extreme size, speed, weight, and power constraints of a flying robot even as it scales down to just a few milligrams. As aircraft scale reduces, scaling physics dictates that the ratio of aerodynamic drag to mass increases. This results in reduced noise in an accelerometer’s airspeed measurement. We show through simulation and experiment on a 30-gram robot that a 2-milligram off-the-shelf accelerometer is able in principle to stabilize a 10-milligram robot despite high noise in the sensor itself. Inspired by wind-vision sensory fusion in the flight controller of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster , we then added a tiny camera and efficient, fly-inspired autocorrelation-based visual processing to allow the robot to estimate and reject wind as well as control its attitude and flight velocity using a Kalman filter. Our biology-inspired approach, validated on a small flying helicopter, has a wind gust response comparable to the fruit fly and is small and efficient enough for a 10-milligram flying vehicle (weighing less than a grain of rice).

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Section: An Airspeed Sensor Using An Accelerometermentioning

confidence: 99%

A gyroscope-free visual-inertial flight control and wind sensing system for 10-mg robots

Fuller

Talwekar

2022

Sci. Robot.

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“…However, their small size results in inherent limitations in payload carrying capacity [14] and susceptibility to external disturbances like wind gusts [15]. Adding mechanosensory flow sensors is therefore highly desirable to enable agile control of these MAVs in the presence of external disturbances [16].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Flow separation sensing on airfoil using a 3D printed biomimetic artificial hair sensor

et al. 2022

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Small-scale unmanned air vehicles require lightweight, compact, and low-power sensors that encompass a variety of sensing modalities to enable flight control and navigation in challenging environments. Flow sensing is one such modality that has attracted much interest in recent years. In this paper, a micro-scale artificial hair sensor is developed to resolve both the direction and magnitude of airflow. The sensor structure employs a high-aspect ratio hair structure and a thin flexible membrane to facilitate the transduction of directional airflow to membrane deflection. The sensor readout is based on capacitive sensing and two pairs of electrodes orthogonal to each other are used to obtain airflow directional information. The sensor structure was fabricated by using two photon polymerization and integrated onto a miniature printed circuit board to enable simple measurement. The sensor’s responses to static displacement loading from different directions were characterized. The experimental results are in good agreement with the simulation results. Furthermore, the sensor’s capability to measure the direction and magnitude of flow was demonstrated. Finally, the sensor was mounted on an airfoil and its ability to detect flow separation was verified.

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“…Inspired by the flow perception mechanisms of birds, insects, and bats, distributed and highly sensitive airflow velocity sensors have been used to cope with complex flow fields. Artificial hair flow sensors have been studied extensively to mimic the fluid-structure interaction principle of biological flow-sensing hairs 3,[5][6][7][8][9] . However, the sensitivity of a hair flow sensor is proportional to the square of the flow velocity, leading to low sensitivity at low flow velocities 3 .…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Flexible calorimetric flow sensor with unprecedented sensitivity and directional resolution for multiple flight parameter detection

Gong,

Di,

Jiang

et al. 2024

Nat Commun

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The accurate perception of multiple flight parameters, such as the angle of attack, angle of sideslip, and airflow velocity, is essential for the flight control of micro air vehicles, which conventionally rely on arrays of pressure or airflow velocity sensors. Here, we present the estimation of multiple flight parameters using a single flexible calorimetric flow sensor featuring a sophisticated structural design with a suspended array of highly sensitive vanadium oxide thermistors. The proposed sensor achieves an unprecedented velocity resolution of 0.11 mm·s−1 and angular resolution of 0.1°. By attaching the sensor to a wing model, the angles of attack and slip were estimated simultaneously. The triaxial flight velocities and wing vibrations can also be estimated by sensing the relative airflow velocity due to its high sensitivity and fast response. Overall, the proposed sensor has many promising applications in weak airflow sensing and flight control of micro air vehicles.

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3D Printed Bio-Inspired Hair Sensor for Directional Airflow Sensing

Cited by 6 publications

References 37 publications

A gyroscope-free visual-inertial flight control and wind sensing system for 10-mg robots

A gyroscope-free visual-inertial flight control and wind sensing system for 10-mg robots

Flow separation sensing on airfoil using a 3D printed biomimetic artificial hair sensor

Flexible calorimetric flow sensor with unprecedented sensitivity and directional resolution for multiple flight parameter detection

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