Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Washington. Biology-inspired sensing and control systems for insect-sized robots
Seattle, WA
Joined April 2011
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This is great. The tilt effect due to proximity to a wall is fed into a Kalman Filter as a wall distance measurement. A simple, reactive way to navigate with no additional sensors. Fitting for the inaugural issue of the Robotics Nature Portfolio Journal
🤖🚁 How can tiny drones see walls & avoid crashing without bulky sensors or cameras? We show quadcopters can leverage propeller airflow physics for exploring unknown environments!
Just published in the new @NaturePortfolio journal npj Robotics @Nature_NPJ
New article out in Science Robotics. Using origami, airflow, and automation to control the dispersal of tiny wireless sensors. A collaboration between groups led by @VikramIyerUW @ShyamGollakota , Alberto Aliseda, and myself.
Excited to share our new Science Robotics paper where we show battery-free micro fliers that use origami to change shape in mid-air and control their descent.
Paper link: science.org/doi/10.1126/scir…
Sawyer B Fuller retweeted
So excited about our new PEACE project here at #UWAllen, designed to support CS researchers in Proactively Exploring and Addressing Consequences and Ethics. See the blog post to hear more! (w/ @rockpang6, @yoshi_kohno, @djg98115)
Technology can have unanticipated consequences once it moves from the lab to the real world. With @NSF support, a team from @UW #UWAllen aims to empower researchers to address such consequences “early, often, and across computer science.”
news.cs.washington.edu/2023/… #CSforGood 1/2
Sawyer B Fuller retweeted
ME and @uwcse researchers received a $10k @UWCoMotion Innovation Gap Fund Award for their project: a better wearable motion tracking system. comotion.uw.edu/funding-and-… @blinkminster @VikramIyerUW
Excited to report a new article from our group coming out this week in Science Robotics: "A gyroscope-free visual-inertial flight control and wind sensing system for 10 mg robots". lnkd.in/grSXMpjP #gnatrobots
Applications include early detection of forest fires, pest onset in agriculture, buried explosives, or mapping hazardous volatiles to find leaks of greenhouse gasses or the spread of airborne diseases.
This helps pave the way to creating small flying robotic insects, which will revolutionize low-altitude atmospheric "air telemetry" -- remote sensing of air composition and flow -- by doing so on a much more detailed and persistent basis than is possible now.
Sawyer B Fuller retweeted
A gnat-inspired sensor suite could promote flight stabilization in milligram-scale robots navigating gusts of wind. @blinkminster @ME_at_UW
📄: scim.ag/Gp
To do this, we take advantage of the physics of small scale, where drag-induced accelerations are larger. These results show that small scale is not only different but advantageous, even in the area of sensing and control.
Instead we used only an accelerometer, which is commercially available in packages weighing as little as 2 mg and 20 microwatts! We combine this with a tiny optic flow camera, which can be made similarly efficient and light, to estimate and control lateral velocity and attitude.
Conventional wisdom says that a rate gyroscope, which measures angular velocity, is an essential part of a flight control system. Our solution turns this notion on its head, eliminating the gyroscope entirely because it is too heavy and power-hungry (>15 mg, >1 mW).
This article was motivated by recent advances by groups around the world that are creating really small ~10 mg flapping-wing devices, about the mass of a grain of rice. We wanted to know if we could design a flight controller for a robot that small.
Very nice change in the laws of my former city to remove arbitrary minimum requirements for parking spots for new buildings! Next up: let’s fix US/Canada zoning laws so they don’t heavily favor cars by allowing for mixed-use development (commercial+residential).
I'll giving the U. Washington ME department seminar tomorrow! About my group's recent work on the U Washington Robofly and offshoot technologies from it.
Title: Biology-inspired flying insect robots for air telemetry
Tuesday, October 4th, from 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Location: MEB 238
Sawyer B Fuller retweeted
It’s #WorldCarFreeDay today.
Especially in cities (where majority of humanity live nowadays), it’s time to change the question:
from moving cars to moving people.
At the end of the day, city is geometry.
Sawyer B Fuller retweeted
I’m #hiring a #phd candidate, to study the flight control and maneuverability of Dipteran insects! wur.nl/nl/vacature/phd-posit… via @WUR
