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Piezoelectric materials are an attractive option for electromechanical transduction on the mesoscale due to their intrinsic high force production, large bandwidth, and favorable scaling characteristics. However, the small displacements they inherently produce are typically too small to be directly used in robotic systems, and thus displacement amplification is needed. Here we present a piezoelectric...
This paper presents the design and control of a teleoperated robotic system for dexterous micromanipulation tasks at the meso-scale, specifically open microsurgery. Robotic open microsurgery is an unexplored yet potentially a high impact area of surgical robotics. Microsurgical operations, such as microanastomosis of blood vessels and reattachment of nerve fibers, require high levels of manual dexterity...
Self-folding enables the fabrication of sophisticated shapes from planar materials without manual assembly. This capability is valuable at millimeter scales, where traditional manufacturing is difficult and expensive, and MEMS techniques are not well-suited to 3-D features with high aspect ratios. Automating the assembly process through self-folding also has the potential to speed up the manufacturing...
A flapping-wing micro air vehicle was built that mimics the control strategy utilized by fruit flies which indirectly modulate wing angle of attack to generate yaw torques. This prototype could also generate roll torques by oscillating the wing hinge at the flapping frequency with an appropriate phase. The roll, yaw and pitch torque generation capability was characterized using a custom single-axis...
Transmission and actuator selection are crucial for robot locomotion at any scale. This is especially true at small scales where actuation choices are limited and locomotion is energetically expensive. These components control the payload capacity and determine the height of the obstacles the robot can navigate over. In this study, we analyze the drivetrain of the new Harvard Ambulatory MicroRobot...
Onboard power remains a major challenge for miniature robotic platforms. Locomotion at small scales demands high power densities from all system components, while limited payload capacities place severe restrictions on the size of the energy source, resulting in integration challenges and short operating times when using conventional batteries. Wireless power delivery has the potential to allow microrobotic...
Control of insect-scale flapping-wing robots is challenging due to weight constraints and inherent instabilities. Instead of adding more actuators to increase the controllability of the flapping-wing robot, we use a single actuator to drive a system of mechanical linkages to cause bilaterally asymmetric changes in the wing hinge spring rest angle of the left and right wings. We show in simulation...
The design and modeling of a segmented myriapod millirobot with a compliant body is presented. A dynamic model is used to demonstrate how body undulations can result from only varying the phase difference in the stance change between adjacent segments - even with passive intersegmental connections - and how these gaits affect locomotion. Different gaits are demonstrated experimentally in a 20-leg,...
Here we present an autonomous 1.7g hexapod robot as a platform for research on centimeter-scale walking robots. It features six spherical five-bar linkages driven by high energy density piezoelectric actuators and onboard power and control electronics. This robot has achieved autonomous ambulation using an alternating tripod gait at speeds up to 0.9 body lengths per second, making this the smallest...
Here we present the design, modeling, and fabrication of a 2g mobile robot. By applying principles from biology and existing meso-scale fabrication techniques, a 5.7cm hexapod robot with sprawled posture has been created, and is capable of locomotion up to 4 body-lengths per second using the alternating tripod gait at 20Hz actuation frequency. Furthermore, this work proves the viability of a new mechanical...
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