Events Calendar

AME - Department Seminar

Speaker: Dr. Néstor O. Pérez-Arancibia, Post-doctoral Fellow at Harvard University

Talk Title: Design, Fabrication, and Control of Flapping-Wing Flying Artificial Insects

Abstract: In this talk, I will discuss the theoretical and experimental challenges that arise in the design, fabrication, and control of biologically inspired at-scale flapping-wing flying robotic insects. In the course of the research presented in this talk, analytical and experimental tools were developed for extracting the relevant dynamics of flapping-wing mechanisms from a systems-and-control perspective. Then, the estimated dynamics were used for developing new robotic designs and fabrication methods in order to obtain better flying prototypes, and for devising flight control strategies in one degree of freedom(altitude). Finally, the proposed approach was extended to other degrees of freedom and to the multiple-input–multiple-output case with the purpose of creating the flying prototypes and control strategies that allowed us to achieve the first unconstrained controlled flight of a flapping-wing artificial insect of this size (< 100 mg).

Biography: Néstor O. Pérez-Arancibia is a postdoctoral fellow with the Microrobotics Laboratory and with the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. His current research focuses on the design and development of control systems for biologically inspired at-scale flying robotic insects. Since April of 2010, he has been part of the team working on the design, fabrication, and control of flapping-wing microrobots, toward the goal of creating a completely autonomous sub-gram flapping-wing flying robot by 2014, as part of the NSF Expeditions in Computing RoboBees project. Dr. Pérez-Arancibia received his Ph.D. from the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2007. From October 2007 to March 2010 he was a Postdoctoral Scholar with the Laser Beam Control Laboratory and also with the Mechatronics and Controls Laboratory at UCLA.

Host: Professor Spedding

Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - Room 150

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Kristi Villegas