Scalable and Modular Manufacturing of Insect-Scale Aerial Robots Towards Swarm Flight Demonstrations

Abstract

Insects demonstrate remarkable capabilities in navigating complex environments and executing tasks such as pollination and coordinated object transport. Inspired by these biological feats, insect-scale micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) have been developed with advanced flight functionalities, including collision resilience and aerial acrobatics. Despite these advancements, MAVs weighing less than a gram continue to face critical challenges in design, assembly, and repair. Additionally, limitations in sensing and control have prevented the realization of swarm-like behaviors, thereby constraining research on collective actions and potential applications such as distributed sensing. To overcome these obstacles, this work introduces a scalable and modular fabrication method for sub-gram MAVs. A parametric design algorithm automatically generates laser cutting templates from a minimal set of design parameters, while stereolithographic 3D printing is employed to fabricate static components such as airframes and connectors, significantly streamlining the production process. This modular approach improves assembly efficiency and repairability, reducing fabrication time by more than half. Using this methodology, two sub-gram MAVs successfully demonstrated controlled hovering and coordinated payload transport. These results represent a significant step toward enabling insect-inspired robotic swarms, providing a platform for future studies on collective flight behaviors and swarm robotics.