A wearable wireless platform for visually stimulating small flying insects

Experimental Verification on Steering Flight of Honeybee by Electrical Stimulation

The artificial locomotion control strategy is the fundamental technique to ensure the accomplishment of the preset assignments for cyborg insects. The existing research has recognized that the electrical stimulation applied to the optic lobes was an appropriate flight control strategy for small insects represented by honeybee. This control technique has been confirmed to be effective for honeybee flight initiation and cessation. However, its regulation effect on steering locomotion has not been fully verified. Here, we investigated the steering control effect of honeybee by applying electrical stimulation signals with different duty cycles and frequencies on the unilateral optic lobes and screened the stimulus parameters with the highest response successful rate. Moreover, we confirmed the effectiveness of steering control by verifying the presence of rotation torque on tethered honeybees and the body orientation change of crawling honeybees. Our study will contribute some reliable parameter references to the motion control of cyborg honeybees.

Research on Key Techniques of Insect Flapping Onset Control Based on Electrical Stimulation

In this paper, an insect flapping onset control method based on electrical stimulation is proposed. The beetle (Allomyrina dithotomus, Coleoptera) is employed for the research carrier, and it’s left and right longitudinal muscles are electrically stimulated to control the flapping onset behavior. The control principle of insect flapping onset utilizing electrical stimulation is analyzed firstly followed by the movement function of the dorsal longitudinal muscle. Subsequently, a micro-control system, which is composed of a PC controller, coordinator and electronic backpack, is designed to realize the wireless control of beetle movements. Finally, the verification experiment is implemented to verify the effectiveness of dorsal longitudinal muscle stimulation with respect to the beetle flapping onset, whereas the comparative experiment emphasizes on determining optimal simulating parameters. The experimental results demonstrate that when the period, duty ratio, number of and amplitude of pulses stimulation signal are assigned to 5 ms, 20%, 90 and 3.3 V respectively, the beetle flapping onset can be controlled with an average response time of 1.69 s. Simultaneously, the optimization of duty ratio from 20% to 40%, and the number of pulses from 90 to 100, is proved to the best parameter configuration.

Insect-computer hybrid legged robot with user-adjustable speed, step length and walking gait

We have constructed an insect-computer hybrid legged robot using a living beetle (Mecynorrhina torquata; Coleoptera). The protraction/retraction and levation/depression motions in both forelegs of the beetle were elicited by electrically stimulating eight corresponding leg muscles via eight pairs of implanted electrodes. To perform a defined walking gait (e.g., gallop), different muscles were individually stimulated in a predefined sequence using a microcontroller. Different walking gaits were performed by reordering the applied stimulation signals (i.e., applying different sequences). By varying the duration of the stimulation sequences, we successfully controlled the step frequency and hence the beetle's walking speed. To the best of our knowledge, this paper presents the first demonstration of living insect locomotion control with a user-adjustable walking gait, step length and walking speed.