Hardware in the loop for optical flow sensing in a robotic bee

The design of autonomous robots involves thedevelopment of many complex, interdependent components,including the mechanical body and its associated actuators,sensors, and algorithms to handle sensor processing, control,and high-level task planning. For the design of a roboticbee (RoboBee) it is necessary to optimize across the designspace for minimum weight and power consumption to increaseflight time; however, the design space of a single component islarge, the interconnectedness and tradeoffs across componentsmust be considered, and interdisciplinary collaborations causedifferent component design timelines.In this work, we show how the development of a hardwarein the loop (HWIL) system for a flapping wing microrobot cansimplify and accelerate evaluation of a large number of designchoices. Specifically, we explore the design space of the visualsystem including sensor hardware and associated optical flowprocessing. We demonstrate the utility of the HWIL systemin exposing trends on system performance for optical flowalgorithm, field of view, sensor resolution, and frame rate.