Sawyer B Fuller

Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Washington. Biology-inspired sensing and control systems for insect-sized robots

[Sawyer B Fuller @blinkminster]

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

[Pakpong Chirarattananon @pakpongc]

🤖🚁 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

[Sawyer B Fuller @blinkminster]

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.

[Shyam Gollakota @ShyamGollakota]

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: https://t.co/2OrwnLBtmG

[Katharina Reinecke @_doctor_kat]

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)

[Daniel Moser @_dmoser]

But Public Transport should make a profit 🤡🤡

[Sawyer B Fuller @blinkminster]

@amtcastle New England has these weird pockets of eccentricity. Something I miss being out west

[Mechanical Engineering at UW @ME_at_UW]

ME and @uwcse researchers received a $10k @UWCoMotion Innovation Gap Fund Award for their project: a better wearable motion tracking system. https://t.co/ZlFWvigRwj @blinkminster @VikramIyerUW

[Sawyer B Fuller @blinkminster]

@HarikrishnaH5 @HarikrishnaH5 link to free download of full manuscript is now on this page: https://t.co/BlAC1HA6cX

[Sawyer B Fuller @blinkminster]

Thank you NSF for generous support of this research!

[Sawyer B Fuller @blinkminster]

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". https://t.co/x9OVSsT0Bm #gnatrobots

[Sawyer B Fuller @blinkminster]

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.

[Sawyer B Fuller @blinkminster]

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.

[Science Robotics @SciRobotics]

A gnat-inspired sensor suite could promote flight stabilization in milligram-scale robots navigating gusts of wind. @blinkminster @ME_at_UW

📄: https://t.co/sXPNUu2Djz

[Sawyer B Fuller @blinkminster]

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.

[Sawyer B Fuller @blinkminster]

With this sensor suite, we can also estimate the wind vector!

[Sawyer B Fuller @blinkminster]

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.

[Sawyer B Fuller @blinkminster]

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).

[Sawyer B Fuller @blinkminster]

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.

[Sawyer B Fuller @blinkminster]

@BomphreyRichard @JonAMichaels I see, that makes more sense. Are there any with wings with a high aspect ratio like that that don’t spread them out? I thought I saw something like this last weekend and it looked like it was flying with wings shaped like this.

[Sawyer B Fuller @blinkminster]

@JonAMichaels @BomphreyRichard

[Sawyer B Fuller @blinkminster]

@JonAMichaels Has anybody studied the aerodynamics of those peculiar wings?