Thumbnail-sized inertial measurement systems based on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS) technology have been perceived as a breakthrough in the field of inertial navigation. However, even as micromechanical accelerometers have seen widespread commercialization, vibratory micromechanical gyroscopes have not enjoyed similar success. Previous approaches to high-performance micromechanical gy...

The first force map has been generated for a 2 DOF wing designed for the MFI project. For the wing beating at a resonance frequency of 139 Hz, the average 3-D forces were found as a function of sinusoidal voltage amplitude and actuator phase difference. An image sequence of the wing trajectory allowed comparison to simulated forces using a quasi-steady state aerodynamic approximation. Finally, ...

This paper presents some recent improvements in the fabrication and control of the Micromechanical Flying Insect (MFI), a centimeter sized aerial vehicle currently being developed at the University of California, Berkeley. We report a lift of 506μN from a single wing, which is sufficient for a 100 mg machine to lift itself off the ground. This lift matches very well with predictions based on qu...

Micromechanical resonators with fundamental vibrational mode frequencies in the range 10MHz–1GHz can now be fabricated [1, 2]. Applications include fast, ultrasensitive force and displacement detectors [3], electrometers [4, 5], and radio frequency signal processors [6]. However, the advances in the development of micromechanical devices also raise the fundamental question of whether mechanical...