How do you combine cicada insect flight and soft robotics to create something crazy?
My friend Andrew Namgoong and I recently took a course at UCLA called “Soft Robotics,” which ended up being a really interesting look into simulations of complex things like hair, towels, and starfish robots. While the mathematical details are a little too complex to delve into in a blog post, I’d like to take the time to do a high-level overview of the craziness that we managed to create.
Simulations of soft robotics, at least from the method we approached it, involve discretizing a specific geometry into multiple nodes points, and connecting those nodes with either beams or rods. A simple way to differentiates a beam versus a rod — rods can twist and bend, whereas beams can only bend. With some iterative mathematics and lots of index tracking in for loops, you can propagate forces through these nodes and beams/rods to create some pretty spectacular results.
For the final hurrah of the course, we decided on the idea of simulating a cicada wing using these simulation techniques. There were a few reasons for this; first, cicada wing geometry has been well studied from a nanotechnology standpoint, so we had a basis to go off of; second, much of the previous research involved the aerodynamics of cicada flight, but didn’t actually look into wing deformation and structure.
So with a lot of late nights and number crunching, we arrived at what I think is one of the coolest flapping motions I’ve ever seen. Imagine if you filmed an insect flying 1,000,000 times slower than reality, and you’ll pretty much end up with this:
Figure 1. Time lapse of cicada wings in flight using discrete elastic rods simulation.
To get into some of the nitty-gritty details, math, and more complex approaches to this problem, check out the “Simulation of Cicada Flight using Discrete Elastic Rods” paper under the website’s “Papers” tab!