Acrobatic Subgram Flyer
A subgram aerial robot with ultra-long endurance that performs acrobatic maneuvers
Acrobatic Subgram Flyer
A subgram aerial robot with ultra-long endurance that performs acrobatic maneuvers
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A subgram aerial robot with ultra-long endurance that performs acrobatic maneuvers
New robot
New robot
The new robot, SoftFly (shown on the left), weighs just 0.75 grams and features four wings, compared to the older design (on the right), which had eight wings. With all wings now oriented outward, the new design eliminates wing–wing interference, resulting in improved hovering efficiency and stability.
New wing and transmission
New wing and transmission
The actuator now drives a single, larger wing that generates comparable lift force. A new guided transmission mechanism minimizes unwanted nonlinear motion, resulting in improved overall performance.
Collision resilient
Collision resilient
The soft artificial muscle, Dielectric Elastomer Actuator (DEA), provides excellent compliance for the new SoftFly robot. Even after colliding with foreign objects, the robot continues flapping normally without any loss in performance.
Ultra-long endurance
Ultra-long endurance
The newly designed wing hinge boasts a lifetime exceeding 2000 seconds. This durable component enables the robot to hover continuously for 1000 seconds—orders of magnitude longer than that of other sub-gram flyers.
Precise control
Precise control
The newly designed controller and reliable hardware enable highly precise control of the new SoftFly robot. It can now follow long trajectories with sub-centimeter lateral position errors—accurate enough to spell out the letters “MIT”.
Aggressive trajectory tracking
Aggressive trajectory tracking
Beyond quasistatic motions, the new nonlinear controller enables the robot to execute aggressive trajectories—the first demonstration of such behavior in sub-gram flyers. The robot achieves lateral velocities of up to 35 cm/s.
Extreme agility
Extreme agility
With a low moment of inertia and the ability to rapidly switch its soft actuator on and off, the robot can perform acrobatic maneuvers such as single and double somersaults and achieve flipping speeds exceeding 7000 °/s.
High performance
High performance
Compared to the previous SoftFly and other sub-gram flyers, the new SoftFly exhibits significantly extended lifetime—an important benchmark for both the DEA community and sub-gram aerial robotics. It also achieves impressive ascent speed and unprecedented lateral velocity while maintaining exceptionally low lateral position tracking error.
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