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Sub-gram flying robots have transformative potential in applications from search and rescue to precision agriculture to environmental monitoring. However, a key gap in achieving autonomous flight for these applications is the low lift to weight ratio of flapping wing and quadrotor designs around 1 g or less. To close this gap, we propose a helictoper-style design that minimizes size and weight by leveraging the high lift, reliability, and low-voltage of sub-gram motors. We take an important step to enable this goal by designing a light-weight, micfrofabricated flybar mechanism to passively stabilize such a robot. Our 48 mg flybar is folded from a flat carbon fiber laminate into a 3D mechanism that couples tilting of the flybar to a change in the angle of attack of the rotors. Our design uses flexure joints instead of ball-in-socket joints common in larger flybars. To expedite the design exploration and optimization of a microfabricated flat-folded flybar, we develop a novel user-in-the-loop bi-level optimization workflow that combines Bayesian optimization design tools and expert feedback. We develop four template designs and use this method to achieve a peak damping ratio of 0.528, an 18.9x improvement from our initial design. Compared to a flybar-less rotor with a near 0 damping ratio, our flybar-rotor mechanism maintains a stable roll and pitch with relative deviations < 1°. Our results show that, if combined with a counter-torque mechanism such as a tail rotor, our miniaturized flybar could mechanically provide attitude stability for a sub-gram helicopter. 

Using wind to disperse microfliers that fall like seeds and leaves can help automate large-scale sensor deployments. Here, we present battery-free microfliers that can change shape in mid-air to vary their dispersal distance. We designed origami microfliers using bistable leaf-out structures and uncovered an important property: A simple change in the shape of these origami structures causes two dramatically different falling behaviors. When unfolded and flat, the microfliers exhibit a tumbling behavior that increases lateral displacement in the wind. When folded inward, their orientation is stabilized, resulting in a downward descent that is less influenced by wind. To electronically transition between these two shapes, we designed a low-power electromagnetic actuator that produces peak forces of up to 200 millinewtons within 25 milliseconds while powered by solar cells. We fabricated a circuit directly on the folded origami structure that includes a programmable microcontroller, a Bluetooth radio, a solar power–harvesting circuit, a pressure sensor to estimate altitude, and a temperature sensor. Outdoor evaluations show that our 414-milligram origami microfliers were able to electronically change their shape mid-air, travel up to 98 meters in a light breeze, and wirelessly transmit data via Bluetooth up to 60 meters away, using only power collected from the sun. 

A visual-inertial flight control and wind sensing system is small and efficient enough for a 10-milligram aerial robot. 

We discuss insect-inspired artificial intelligence as the key to autonomous robots with extremely limited computing power.