Controlled Lift for an Efficient ARtificial insect flight – CLEAR-flight

Since nature is comprised of a variety of animal designs that show promise means of locomotion in ground, underwater and aerial environments, bio-inspired material and system research has received significant attention in the last decade. Among flying species observed in nature, insects certainly demonstrate the most impressive aerial capacities in terms of hovering, backward flight or sudden acceleration and their diversity brings multiple solutions to design nano air vehicles (NAV’s). To date, the microsystems sector has not been used fully for designing flying objects mimicking insect and scientific researchers working to artificially re-create hovering insect flight have not yet realized an integrated flapping wing nano-mechanical device that is able to fly. Therefore, the challenge is first to mimic the flapping of an insect and second to move towards the realization of a NAV.
This issue requires solving many scientific and technological challenges. For this reason, a team of researchers from IEMN, ONERA and ENSIAME institutes was established since 2005. This grouping of skills allowed work to be carried out on:
- the design of a micromachined polymer structure with a body and wings,
- the integration of electromagnetic micro-actuators for wings actuation,
- the kinematic and aerodynamic around the NAV,
- the experimentation on prototypes.
Our NAV has reached a certain maturity in the fabrication process as in its aero-elastic modeling and the results exhibited are very encouraging. Furthermore, this prototype is to our knowledge, the first one at the size of real insects able to create lift with the help of passive torsion and without any articulation. The global objectives of this project entitled Controlled Lift for an Efficient ARtificial insect flight (CLEAR-flight) are now to produce sufficient lift forces to allow the flight and at the same time with the help of THURMELEC to conceive, design and implement the electronic functionalities necessary for a remotely flight control.
Developments include firstly the use of preceding developed modeling tools and experimental means to optimize the structure design, and the electromagnetic actuation in terms of weight, power consumption, and power harvested.
In a second step, the aim will be to determine the optimal kinematic in order to get the necessary forces to propel an artificial Insect. The aero-elastic tool will help to determine the most suited shape of wings and experiments will complete the numerical predictions.
In a third step, the research will focus on the choice and the minimization of electronic components such as microcontrollers and accelerometers or gyroscopes to allow the maneuverability of the artificial insect to go around obstacles. Electronic features such as flight control and altitude sensing will be first validated on prototypes of centimeter scale and the adopted approach will be to fabricate a chip integrating all electronic components. Furthermore sources of energy needed to power these components will be identified.
In a fourth step, work will be done on the analysis of communication scenarios. The aim of this task will be to design a mobile wireless sensor network (WSN) particular scenario in accordance with the specific characteristics and constraints of the NAV sensors: firstly mobile sensors whose spatial position can be controlled, and which can potentially act on their environment, and secondly mobile sensors, with extremely limited energetic resources, embedded mass and size.
In conclusion, understanding of flapping flight and control of materials with strong deformations for use in microsystems, and especially in microfluidics and flexible electronics, is very promising from a scientific point of view. In military domain, the hovering ability of insects, coupled with the ability for a quick transition to forward flight, provide an ideal platform for surveillance, search and rescue.