Kristofer S.J. Pister (Advisor)

Since drones can be flown remotely or autonomously and can navigate dangerous environments without any risk to human operators, they are attractive for military applications, including surveillance, reconnaissance, and combat missions. At the same time, enemy drones pose a growing serious threat to civilians and soldiers. Current anti-drone warfare is either inaccurate, expensive, or large in size, so this project aims to build a low-cost, crayon-sized radar-guided microrocket to target drones up to 100 m away.

Project currently funded by: Membership Fees

Developing task schedulers and low-level end-to-end controllers for microrobots operating in complex environments often demands extensive system and environment knowledge, leading to prolonged design cycles for specialized controllers. To expedite the generation of general controllers without requiring domain-specific expertise, we propose utilizing model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) trained within simulated environments. Our research advances microrobot control through two key approaches: modeling the long-term dynamics of robots and distilling computationally intensive model...

Our goal is to build a family of autonomous silicon robotic insects with actuating, computing, and power capabilities integrated. A silicon-on-insulator (SOI) device is used to house all three components. These robots use electrostatic actuators driving silicon linkages, all fabricated in the device layer of the wafer. By using electrostatic actuation, these actuator linkage systems have the advantage of being low power compared to other methods of actuation on microscale granting robot autonomy through low-power energy harvesting. Computation and communication are carried out with Single...

The relentless pursuit of smaller, cheaper, and lower-power wireless electronics has driven the design of novel radio designs such as crystal-free radios, that o er a fully functional wireless node with minimal external components. At Berkeley, the Single-Chip Micro Mote (SCμM), a 3x2 mm, 4.2mg crystal-free 802.15.4 and BLE wireless SoC, was developed to make swarms of mm-scale microrobots a reality. This dissertation will begin by discussing SCμM in the context of system integration, including the challenge of accurate channel frequency tuning in the face of varying temperature and...