These include 1) flapping-wing vehicles (e.g., Harvard RoboBee); and 2) impulsive systems inspired by mantis shrimp strikes (e.g., strikes within 4 ms). The intrinsic challenges for such systems with extreme behaviors include complex dynamics with multiple timescales (fast and slow) requiring high-speed sensing for feedback control design. In addition, due to their small size and weight, an understanding of environmental conditions (i.e., fluid conditions) is necessary for controlled motion in unstructured (e.g., outdoor) environments, where current insect-scale robot experiments are limited to indoor environments. 

My goal is to design a robust control framework for such systems with extreme behaviors to overcome the challenges for control in unstructured environments, with a long-term goal of extending these methods toward intelligent swarm robotics. Constructing a novel control framework for these systems will provide a fundamental understanding of high mobility in synthetic systems and provide interdisciplinary research tools for biology.