Flight cessation and modulation control of coleopteran employing wireless miniature muscular stimulators

Abstract

Recently, the combination of electronic devices with living insects has been explored to manipulate their crawling or flying, similar to manipulable biological actuators. However, the investigations of controlled flight cessation or flight modulation of the coleopteran characterized by the strong payload capacity have rarely been reported thus far. On the basis of anatomy, this study proposed and validated two separate muscular electrical stimulation protocols to stop and modulate the flight of coleopteran, respectively. The experiment results demonstrated that the suggested cessation protocol realized flight cessation control with a success rate of 83% and a short response time. Meanwhile, the flight modulation stimulation protocol was able to increase the flapping frequency by an average of 7.3%. Finally, we designed a wireless miniature backpack weighing 1 gram to actuate the flight cessation and modulation of coleopteran in free-flying through the remote command transmission. The proposed method has potential applications in the development of the insect-cyborg micro air vehicle.