arXiv subjects

YuFeng Chen

Publications and source records attributed to YuFeng Chen.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Controlled Flight of an Insect-Scale Flapping-Wing Robot via Integrated Onboard Sensing and Computation

Aerial insects can effortlessly navigate dense vegetation, whereas similarly sized aerial robots typically depend on offboard sensors and computation to maintain stable flight. This disparity restricts insect-scale robots to operation within motion capture environments, substantially limiting their applicability to tasks such as search-and-rescue and precision agriculture. In this work, we present a 1.29-gram aerial robot capable of hovering and tracking trajectories with solely onboard sensing and computation. The combination of a sensor suite, estimators, and a low-level controller achieved centimeter-scale positional flight accuracy. Additionally, we developed a hierarchical controller in which a human operator provides high-level commands to direct the robot's motion. In a 30-second flight experiment conducted outside a motion capture system, the robot avoided obstacles and ultimately landed on a sunflower. This level of sensing and computational autonomy represents a significant advancement for the aerial microrobotics community, further opening opportunities to explore onboard planning and power autonomy.

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arXiv2025

Aerobatic maneuvers in insect-scale flapping-wing aerial robots via deep-learned robust tube model predictive control

Aerial insects exhibit highly agile maneuvers such as sharp braking, saccades, and body flips under disturbance. In contrast, insect-scale aerial robots are limited to tracking non-aggressive trajectories with small body acceleration. This performance gap is contributed by a combination of low robot inertia, fast dynamics, uncertainty in flapping-wing aerodynamics, and high susceptibility to environmental disturbance. Executing highly dynamic maneuvers requires the generation of aggressive flight trajectories that push against the hardware limit and a high-rate feedback controller that accounts for model and environmental uncertainty. Here, through designing a deep-learned robust tube model predictive controller, we showcase insect-like flight agility and robustness in a 750-millgram flapping-wing robot. Our model predictive controller can track aggressive flight trajectories under disturbance. To achieve a high feedback rate in a compute-constrained real-time system, we design imitation learning methods to train a two-layer, fully connected neural network, which resembles insect flight control architecture consisting of central nervous system and motor neurons. Our robot demonstrates insect-like saccade movements with lateral speed and acceleration of 197 centimeters per second and 11.7 meters per second square, representing 447$\%$ and 255$\%$ improvement over prior results. The robot can also perform saccade maneuvers under 160 centimeters per second wind disturbance and large command-to-force mapping errors. Furthermore, it performs 10 consecutive body flips in 11 seconds - the most challenging maneuver among sub-gram flyers. These results represent a milestone in achieving insect-scale flight agility and inspire future investigations on sensing and compute autonomy.

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arXiv2025

Hovering Flight of Soft-Actuated Insect-Scale Micro Aerial Vehicles using Deep Reinforcement Learning

Soft-actuated insect-scale micro aerial vehicles (IMAVs) pose unique challenges for designing robust and computationally efficient controllers. At the millimeter scale, fast robot dynamics ($\sim$ms), together with system delay, model uncertainty, and external disturbances significantly affect flight performances. Here, we design a deep reinforcement learning (RL) controller that addresses system delay and uncertainties. To initialize this neural network (NN) controller, we propose a modified behavior cloning (BC) approach with state-action re-matching to account for delay and domain-randomized expert demonstration to tackle uncertainty. Then we apply proximal policy optimization (PPO) to fine-tune the policy during RL, enhancing performance and smoothing commands. In simulations, our modified BC substantially increases the mean reward compared to baseline BC; and RL with PPO improves flight quality and reduces command fluctuations. We deploy this controller on two different insect-scale aerial robots that weigh 720 mg and 850 mg, respectively. The robots demonstrate multiple successful zero-shot hovering flights, with the longest lasting 50 seconds and root-mean-square errors of 1.34 cm in lateral direction and 0.05 cm in altitude, marking the first end-to-end deep RL-based flight on soft-driven IMAVs.

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arXiv2022

Robust, High-Rate Trajectory Tracking on Insect-Scale Soft-Actuated Aerial Robots with Deep-Learned Tube MPC

Accurate and agile trajectory tracking in sub-gram Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) is challenging, as the small scale of the robot induces large model uncertainties, demanding robust feedback controllers, while the fast dynamics and computational constraints prevent the deployment of computationally expensive strategies. In this work, we present an approach for agile and computationally efficient trajectory tracking on the MIT SoftFly, a sub-gram MAV (0.7 grams). Our strategy employs a cascaded control scheme, where an adaptive attitude controller is combined with a neural network policy trained to imitate a trajectory tracking robust tube model predictive controller (RTMPC). The neural network policy is obtained using our recent work, which enables the policy to preserve the robustness of RTMPC, but at a fraction of its computational cost. We experimentally evaluate our approach, achieving position Root Mean Square Errors lower than 1.8 cm even in the more challenging maneuvers, obtaining a 60% reduction in maximum position error compared to our previous work, and demonstrating robustness to large external disturbances

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