Engineers have created a set of sensors for miniature flying robots. This was reported by Tech Xplore.

Mosquito-sized miniature drones could potentially assist humanity in many missions, including search and rescue operations. Despite their potential, creating these robots has proven to be a difficult task due to the technical problems that arise when trying to stabilize their flight and artificially reproduce the insects’ innate abilities.

Researchers at the University of Washington have recently developed an avionics system for flight control that could solve this problem. Flying insects are given the stability of a hawk – small extensions of the wings, sensors that play the role of a vibrating gyroscope. While the target weight for miniature airplanes is 10mg, engineers cannot create a gyroscope lighter than 15mg. Therefore, the gyroscope, which measures the angular position of the object, was replaced by a miniature accelerometer weighing 2 mg, which measures not the position of the body in space, but its acceleration along various axes. Additionally, the scientists designed a microprocessor and an optical airflow sensor to predict flight speed and direction.

The authors tested their system in both simulations and real experiments using a 30 gram robot and found that it was able to successfully stabilize its flight.