Articles
The potential for small-scale robots is vast. Imagine using robotic bees for artificial pollination or deploying robotic spiders to protect crops from insect pests, instead of using insecticides.
Solving challenging multidisciplinary engineering problems like these is a particular interest of mine, and I’ve spent more than 10 years developing micro-air vehicles, making significant contributions to the design and understanding of insect-scale flapping-wing vehicles.
My focus on micro-robotics involves developing models for fluid mechanics and actuation dynamics, and integrating these into designs. Examples include bio-inspired flying and jumping robots, micro-pumps and energy harvesters.
Small is beautiful
There are exciting opportunities in researching microsystems, as they provide novel solutions to a wide range of problems within many areas, including aerospace, biomedical and nuclear applications.
Developing microsystems involves several challenges, such as small-scale, precise control, low power consumption, ease of manufacture and low cost. But there are many opportunities for brilliant science and engineering outcomes along the way. My aim is to enable the future of smart miniature engineering systems, and micro-robotics is at the core of our work. We are doing innovative research to set the agenda for the future, where smart micro-robots are deployed in unknown environments and can plan and execute useful missions against given goals.
Many of our micro-robotic designs are inspired from nature. Our research usually addresses two points: how advanced engineering techniques can be used to better understand the natural world, and how understanding the natural world can help solve micro-robotic challenges and ultimately lead to useful applications.
Spiders are an inspiration for a unique class of jumping robots. While most insects use jumping to escape predation, spiders jump to kill. They show exemplary jumping behaviour at a small scale, with evidence of intelligence in assessing their surroundings and planning prey capture.
During our research, we tackled the challenging task of training a spider to jump so that we could study it. We usually transfer the spider between two jumping platforms until it becomes familiar with the challenge. We then start to change the horizontal and vertical distances of the jump to examine the spider’s performance.
Actuators are the heart of any moving engineering system, and they are key in our work. We have access to various different electrical actuation technologies that mimic the action of muscle for insect-scale applications.
Piezoelectric actuation is one of the most mature choices at this scale and it has received significant attention. However, the biggest challenge with piezoelectric actuation is the electrical power supply and management. For example, highly successful piezoelectric flapping-wing propulsion systems have been developed, yet the electrical power systems to drive them are too big to integrate into vehicles.
At the University of Manchester, we are researching many possible actuation options and coming up with novel concepts for micro-robotic applications, to overcome many of the limitations.
Ethical aspects
Micro-robotics research is in its infancy but, with the widespread deployment of these robots in the future, there must be regulations and laws to organise and ensure ethical use. I believe any tool or engineering system could be used either in beneficial applications or for unethical purposes. The responsibility here is mainly on the shoulders of the user.
For engineers and scientists, the main aim is to make the world a better place by providing new tools and systems capable of performing useful applications.
We are familiar with robots taking over the jobs that humans do, yet for every human there are around 200m insects performing roles in the natural environment. Clearly we are years away from widespread adoption of insect-like robotics, yet nature shows what is possible, and fundamental research done now will set the agenda for the future.
Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.