Design, Fabrication and Dynamic Testing of Insect-Inspired Nano Air Vehicles

When developing a flying robot on the insect scale, all process must be developed from scratch as usual macroscale solutions for the design and fabrication would not satisfy the extreme mass and power limitations. In this context, the aims of this work are to outline the proposed bioinspired approach and to present the different original concepts deployed to tackle such an issue, before analyzing carefully the simulated and experimental results. More precisely, the presented nano air vehicle is inspired from the diptera order and consists of two pairs of wings micromachined using MicroElectroMechanical Systems technologies and an electromagnetic actuator added to the thorax to control the kinematics of the wings. The prototypes weigh as little as 22 mg with a 25 mm wingspan and 15 mm length and demonstrate a lift force equivalent to their weight.