Scalable and Modular Manufacturing of Insect-Scale Aerial Robots Towards Swarm Flight Demonstrations

Insects demonstrate remarkable capabilities in navigating complex environments and executing tasks such as pollination and coordinated object transport. Inspired by these biological feats, insect-scale micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) have been developed with advanced flight functionalities, including collision resilience and aerial acrobatics. Despite these advancements, MAVs weighing less than a gram continue to face critical challenges in design, assembly, and repair. Additionally, limitations in sensing and control have prevented the realization of swarm-like behaviors, thereby constraining research on collective actions and potential applications such as distributed sensing. To overcome these obstacles, this work introduces a scalable and modular fabrication method for sub-gram MAVs. A parametric design algorithm automatically generates laser cutting templates from a minimal set of design parameters, while stereolithographic 3D printing is employed to fabricate static components such as airframes and connectors, significantly streamlining the production process. This modular approach improves assembly efficiency and repairability, reducing fabrication time by more than half. Using this methodology, two sub-gram MAVs successfully demonstrated controlled hovering and coordinated payload transport. These results represent a significant step toward enabling insect-inspired robotic swarms, providing a platform for future studies on collective flight behaviors and swarm robotics.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Hsiao, Yi-Hsuan

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Chen, Yufeng (Kevin)

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
• Copyright retained by author(s)

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/158965

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/158965