Using a MEMS gyroscope to stabilize the attitude of a fly-sized hovering robot

Creating an autonomous flying vehicle the size of a honeybee presents a number of technical challenges because of its small scale. As vehicle wingspan diminishes, angular acceleration rates increase, necessitating sensing and control systems with high bandwidth. Hovering demonstrations have so far required feedback from highspeed motion capture cameras to estimate the angular velocity, attitude, and position of the vehicle to provide the continuous corrective feedback necessary to avoid tumbling. To achieve autonomous flight, it will be necessary to incorporate a suite of sensors carried onboard. Here we present a step in this direction by integrating a MEMS gyroscope onto an 80 mg flapping-wing micro air vehicle to provide attitude feedback in flight. This enables 2–5 s hovering flights in which the motion capture system provides only position feedback. Our vehicle, and likely others in the future of similar scale, is propelled by flapping wings that generate vibration. Our results indicate that the resulting accelerations, measured as high as 5 g by the sensor’s accelerometer, significantly distort readings from the accelerometer but not the gyroscope.