An Architecture for Onboard Flight Control of a Sub-Gram Piezo-Actuated Aerial Vehicle

Abstract

The development of agile, autonomous insect-scale aerial vehicles opens promising avenues for applications in environmental monitoring, search and rescue, and swarm robotics. However, the creation of such miniature platforms is hindered by stringent constraints on size, weight, and computational resources to achieve sensing, control, and actuation all within tight limits. This thesis presents a comprehensive architecture for onboard flight control of a sub-gram, piezo-actuated aerial vehicle. The design and implementation of a microcontroller-based high-voltage actuation system capable of generating precise signals for piezoelectric actuators is discussed in detail. A finite state machine (FSM) combined with a cascaded PID control architecture was developed for stabilization and maneuvering, utilizing real-time feedback from external motion capture systems operating at 240 Hz. Additionally, a lightweight and efficient logging infrastructure was developed to enable continuous recording of state estimates and control signals for post-flight analysis and debugging. Experimental results demonstrate the system's successful real-time generation of smooth, continuous sinusoidal waveforms for the piezoelectric actuators in response to pose feedback, as well as reliable capture of flight log data. Collectively, these results highlight the effectiveness of the proposed system and lay the foundation for control autonomy in insect-scale aerial robotics.