TinySense: A Lighter Weight and More Power-Efficient Avionics System for Flying Insect-Scale Robots

In this paper, we introduce advances in the sensor suite of an autonomous flying insect robot (FIR) weighing less than a gram. FIRs, because of their small weight and size, offer unparalleled advantages in terms of material cost and scalability. However, their size introduces considerable control challenges, notably high-speed dynamics, restricted power, and limited payload capacity. While there have been advancements in developing lightweight sensors, often drawing inspiration from biological systems, no sub-gram aircraft has been able to attain sustained hover without relying on feedback from external sensing such as a motion capture system. The lightest vehicle capable of sustained hovering-the first level of “sensor autonomy”-is the much larger 28 g Crazyflie. Previous work reported a reduction in size of that vehicle's avionics suite to 187 mg and 21 mW. Here, we report a further reduction in mass and power to only 78.4 mg and 15 mW. We replaced the laser rangefinder with a lighter and more efficient pressure sensor, and built a smaller optic flow sensor around a global-shutter imaging chip. A Kalman Filter (KF) fuses these measurements to estimate the state variables that are needed to control hover: pitch angle, translational velocity, and altitude. Our system achieved performance comparable to that of the Crazyflie's estimator while in flight, with root mean squared errors of 1.573 <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">deg, 0.186 m / s</tex>, and 0.136 m, respectively, relative to motion capture.