Aerial insects can effortlessly navigate dense vegetation, whereas similarly sized aerial robots typically depend on offboard sensors and computation to maintain stable flight. This disparity restricts insect-scale robots to operation within motion capture environments, substantially limiting their applicability to tasks such as search-and-rescue and precision agriculture. In this work, we present a 1.29-gram aerial robot capable of hovering and tracking trajectories with solely onboard sensing and computation. The combination of a sensor suite, estimators, and a low-level controller achieved centimeter-scale positional flight accuracy. Additionally, we developed a hierarchical controller in which a human operator provides high-level commands to direct the robot's motion. In a 30-second flight experiment conducted outside a motion capture system, the robot avoided obstacles and ultimately landed on a sunflower. This level of sensing and computational autonomy represents a significant advancement for the aerial microrobotics community, further opening opportunities to explore onboard planning and power autonomy.

翻译：空中昆虫能够轻松穿越茂密植被，而尺寸相近的飞行机器人通常需要依赖外部传感器与计算系统才能维持稳定飞行。这种差异使得昆虫级机器人仅能在动作捕捉环境中运行，严重限制了其在搜救任务与精准农业等场景中的应用潜力。本研究展示了一款重量仅1.29克的飞行机器人，其仅通过机载传感与计算系统即可实现悬停与轨迹跟踪功能。通过集成传感器套件、状态估计器及底层控制器，该系统实现了厘米级精度的位置飞行控制。此外，我们开发了分层控制系统，由操作人员提供高层指令来引导机器人运动。在动作捕捉系统外进行的30秒飞行实验中，该机器人成功规避障碍物并最终降落于向日葵上。这种层级的传感与计算自主性标志着空中微机器人领域的重大进展，为探索机载路径规划与能源自主性开辟了新的可能性。