RESS: Progress in Insect-Scale Robots

Seminar: DREAM | April 28 | 4-5 p.m. | 540 Cory Hall

Speaker/Performer: Rob Wood, Harvard University

Sponsor: Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS)

We seek to elucidate how to apply biological principles to the creation of robust, agile, inexpensive robotic insects. However, biological inspiration alone is not sufficient to create robots that mimic the agile locomotion of their arthropod analogs. This is particularly true as the characteristic size of the robot is decreased: to create high performance robotic insects, we must explore novel manufacturing paradigms, develop a greater understanding of complex fluid-structure interactions for flapping-wings, generate high efficiency power and control electronics, create new forms of actuation and sensing, and explore alternative control strategies for computation-limited systems. This talk will describe challenges for the creation of robotic insects and the state of the art for each of these topics. I will also give an overview of the topics we are addressing in the NSF Expeditions in Computing 'RoboBees' project.

Event Contact: ramv@eecs.berkeley.edu, 510-642-9423