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Srinivas Katkoori and collaborators receive best paper award at IFIT IoT 2021

December 9, 2021

CSE Associate Professor Srinivas Katkoori and collaborators S. Abdullah, A. Priyasha, S. R. Patri, from NIT Warangal, India, received the best paper award at IFIT IoT 2021 for their paper “Smart Agriculture using Flapping Wing Micro Aerial Vehicles (FWMAVs).”

Abstract: One of the main problems in smart agriculture is smart artificial pollination with Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs). With their small body size and dimensions, they hold the promise of substituting insect pollinators. We propose an improvised version of the previously designed insect-scale mapping-wing micro air vehicles (FWMAVs), namely Har-vard RoboBee-like two-winged robot and the four-winged USC Bee+. This version attempts to solve the critical issue of low controllability observed in the previous prototypes which render them inefficient for practical applications such as artificial pollination. We reduce the number of actuators to just one and eliminate the dependency of pitch, roll, and yaw on the wing-movement by controlling the system with weight shifting mechanism controlled by electromagnets. We successfully validate the proposed design in Gazebo simulations. The proposed design requires less material and low manufacturing cost due to simpler design and a low number of required parts. To the best of our knowledge, this design is the first of its kind which is a fully functional FWMAV suitable for artificial pollination.