Design and TakeOff Flight of a SamaraInspired RevolvingWing Robot Motivated by a winged seed, which takes advantage of a wing with high angles of attack and its associated leadingedge vortex to boost lift, we propose a powered 13.8gram aerial robot with the maximum takeoff weight of 310 mN (31.6 gram) or thrusttoweight ratio of 2.3. The robot, consisting of two airfoils and two horizontally directed motordriven propellers, revolves around its vertical axis to hover. To amplify the thrust production while retaining a minimal weight, we develop an optimization framework for the robot and airfoil geometries. The analysis integrates quasisteady aerodynamic models for the airfoils and the propellers with the motor model. We fabricated the robots according to the optimized design. The prototypes are experimentally tested. The revolvingwing robot produces approximately 50% higher lift compared to conventional multirotor designs. Finally, an uncontrolled hovering flight is presented.

Control of Flying Robotic Insects: A Perspective and Unifying Approach We discuss the problem of designing and implementing controllers for insectscale flappingwing micro air vehicles (FWMAVs), from a unifying perspective and employing two different experimental platforms; namely, a Harvard RoboBeelike twowinged robot and the fourwinged USC Bee. Through experiments, we demonstrate that a method that employs quaternion coordinates for attitude control, developed to control quadrotors, can be applied to drive both robotic insects considered in this work. The proposed notion that a generic strategy can be used to control several types of artificial insects with some common characteristics was preliminarily tested and validated using a set of experiments, which include position and attitudecontrolled flights. We believe that the presented results are interesting and valuable from both the research and educational perspectives.