Toward Controlled Flight of the Ionocraft: A Flying Microrobot Using Electrohydrodynamic Thrust With Onboard Sensing and No Moving Parts

This letter presents an insect-scale microrobot that flies silently and with no mechanical moving parts, using a mechanism with no analogue in the natural world: electrohydrodynamic thrust produced by ions generated via corona discharge. For the first time, attitude and acceleration data are continuously collected from takeoff and sustained flight of a 2 cm × 2 cm, 30 mg “ionocraft” carrying a 37 mg 9-axis commercial IMU on FlexPCB payload, with external tethers for power and data transfer. The ionocraft's steady-state thrust versus voltage profile, dynamic response to a time-varying signal around a high voltage dc bias point, and aerodynamic drag at incident angles around 90° are measured. These experimental measurements, as well as measured IMU sensor noise, are inserted into a MATLAB Simulink simulation environment. Simulation shows controlled hovering and planned flight in arbitrary straight trajectories in the XY plane.