Hoang-Vu Phan

I'm currently a postdoctoral scientist at Laboratory of Intelligent Systems, EPFL, Switzerland. I have more than ten years of experience working on insect-inspired flying robots, multimodal locomotion robots, and insect flight.

My research centers on the development of a centimeter-scale, motor-driven flapping wing robot, which is truly insect-like in terms of tailless and two-winged configurations, attitude control approach, and hovering flight capability. I carried out studies to optimize its flight performance by inventing simple yet effective designs for lightweight, and improving lift generation and power efficiency for long endurance flight. The three most outstanding achievements during my research are: (1) my 21 gram robot could eventually perform its first controlled flight with all onboard components; (2) after substantial modifications, the robot becomes simpler, lighter, and more robust and agile that allow it to be the lightest tailless robot to sustain a long endurance flight for up to 9 minutes; and (3), the robot equipped with beetle-inspired collapsible wings could recover from inflight wing collisions, which is the first ever insect-inspired robot that can fly safely after collisions. My research results were featured on Sciencemag, TechXplore, and many other media in different languages.

My research also targets to a multimodal and multifunctional bio-inspired robot which in addition to flight can be equipped with more modes of transportation such as jumping, crawling, running, etc., similar to real flying animals.