Evolving Hovering Flapping Flight

CAD model of the hardware encarnation

Close up of the physical ornithopter

Humans have long been fascinated by flight. Yet no one has been able to create a robot capable of hovering flapping flight on par with natures elegance. My ongoing project has been to use evolutionary design, combining simulated and hardware evaluations, to create a flapping hovering robot. Over the past year I successfully evolved several different robots in simulation, and built one with the help of my research partner. Then we set about evolving it in hardware, and showed significant improvement, though no positive lift.

We are currently working on building a much lighter and more bio-mimetic design. We hope to have it evolving over the next few weeks after which we will work on developing a controller for it.

see it fly after 70 generations of evolving bezier control patterns

see it flap after 70 generations of hardware evolution of servo control patterns

Publications:

van Breugel, Floris, William Regan, and Hod Lipson. Passively Stable Flapping Hovering Micro Air Vehicle. International Symposium on Flying Insects and Robotics (pg. 15-16), 12 Aug. 2007. (128 kb)

van Breugel, Floris, and Hod Lipson. Evolving Buildable Flapping Ornithopters. GECCO, 2005. (588 kb)