Biomimetic Sensor Modeling and Simulations for Flight Control of a Micromechanical Flying Insect

A technique in which a micromechanical resonator is operated at large amplitudes while in situ localized annealed to temperatures exceeding 880 o C is shown to be an effective method for both removal of surface contaminants and for possible " redistribution " of the structural material towards substantially higher quality factor Q and greatly enhanced drift stability. The technique not only pro...

A 2 DOF resonant thorax structure has been designed and fabricated for the MFI project. Miniature piezoelectric PZN-PT unimorph actuators were fabricated and used to drive a four-bar transmission mechanism. The current thorax design utilizes two actuated four-bars and a spherical joint to drive a rigid wing. Rotationally compliant flexure joints have been tested with lifetimes over 10 cycles. W...

The mechanism which real flying insects use to detect body rotation has been simulated. The results show that an angular rate sensor can be made based on such a biological mechanism. Two types of biomimetic gyroscopes have been constructed using foils of stainless steel. The first device is connected directly to a compliant cantilever. The second device is placed on a mechanically amplifying fo...

This paper presents the fabrication and the testing of piezoelectric unimorph actuators with embedded piezoelectric sensors which are meant to be used for the actuation of the Micromechanical Flying Insect (MFI). First the fabrication process of a piezoelectric bending actuator comprising a standard unimorph and a rigid extension is described together with the advantages of adding such an exten...

Piezoelectrically actuated micromechanical resonators have been a subject of extensive research for the past decade with the main goal of replacing quartz resonators in timing applications. Aluminum nitride (AlN) has been the main contender as a piezoelectric ceramic replacement for quartz since its low-temperature sputtering process has been developed. In recent years, gallium nitride (GaN) ha...

The rapid layout synthesis of a microresonator from high-level functional specifications and design constraints is demonstrated. Functional parameters such as resonant frequency, quality factor, and displacement amplitude at resonance are satisfied while simultaneously minimizing an objective function. The optimal synthesis tool allows exploration of micromechanical design issues and objectives...

The Limited Receptive Area (LIRA) neural classifier is proposed for texture recognition of mechanically treated metal surfaces. It may be applied in systems that have to recognize position and orientation of complex work pieces during micromechanical device assembly as well as in surface quality inspection systems. The performance of the proposed classifier was tested on a specially created ima...

The spatial organization of cellular communities plays a fundamental role in determining intercellular communication and emergent behavior. However, few tools exist to modulate tissue organization at the scale of individual cells, particularly in the case of dynamic manipulation. Micromechanical reconfigurable culture achieves dynamic control of tissue organization by culturing adherent cells o...

Focused ion beam milling is a processing technology which allows flexible direct writing of nanometer scale features efficiently substituting electron beam lithography. No mask need results in ability for patterns writing even on fragile micromechanical devices. In this work we studied the abilities of the tool for fabrication of diffraction grating couplers in silicon nitride waveguides. The g...