Liwei Lin (Advisor)

Insect-scale untethered flight with maneuverability is very challenging toward possible practical applications and attitude-stabilized flight (hovering) is one of the first steps for long-time air flight operations. In this project, we introduce the insect-scale, untethered, rotating-wing aerial vehicles with inherent stability by the gyroscopic effect to achieve several key advancements: (1) powered by alternating magnetic fields wirelessly; (2) 160-mg in weight and 20.0-mm-in-diameter in size – smallest untethered flying robot in the world; and (3) attitude-stabilized flights (...

This work reports an engineered platform for the non-contact haptic stimulation on human skins by means of an array of piezoelectric micromachined ultrasonic transducer (pMUT) via the beamforming scheme. Compared to the state-of-art reports, three distinctive achievements have been demonstrated: (1) individual single pMUT unit based on lithium niobate (LN) with measured high SPL (sound pressure level) of 133 dB at 2 mm away; (2) a beamforming scheme simulated and experimentally proved to generate ~2.3x higher pressure near the focal point; and (3) the combination of auto-positioning and...

We present a systematic MEMS structural design approach via a “trial-and-error” learning process by using the deep reinforcement learning framework. This scheme incorporates the feedbackfrom each “trial” to obtain sophisticated strategies for MEMS design optimizations. Disk-shaped resonators are selected as case studies and three remarkable advancements have been realized:1) accurate overall performance predictions (97.9%) via supervised learning models; 2) efficientMEMS structural optimizations to guarantee targeted structural properties with an excellent generation accuracy of 97.7%; and...