Milligram-Scale Micro Aerial Vehicle Design for Low-Voltage Operation

We present a 70mg, 3cm wing-span, flapping wing aerial vehicle capable of generating up to 60mg of lift using an electromagnetic actuator with low-voltage input (≈5.5V). Its design is novel, with the actuation and transmission integrated into a single resonant mechanism, thus not requiring any small-linear-displacement amplifying stages seen in other works. It can produce ±45° wing strokes and ±45° wing plane rotations at 98Hz operation mimicking relevant insects at this size scale. With required input power of only 250mW, it is, to the best of our knowledge, the most energy efficient electromagnetic design at the sub-100mg scale reported to date, and an order of magnitude more efficient than all other electromagnetic works.