Abstract— we present the remote control of insects in free flight via an implantable radio-equipped miniature neural stimulating system. This paper summarizes these results. The pronotum mounted system consisted of neural stimulators, muscular stimulators, a radio transceiver-equipped microcontroller and a microbattery. Flight initiation, cessation and elevation control were accomplished through neural stimulus of the brain which elicited, suppressed or modulated wing oscillation. Turns were triggered through the direct muscular stimulus of either of the basalar muscles. We characterized the response times, success rates, and free-flight trajectories elicited by our neural control systems in remotely-controlled beetles. We believe this type of technology will open the door to in-flight perturbation and recording of insect flight responses. Keywords— micro air vehicle, biological machine, neuromuscular stimulation, flight control I. INTRODUCTION ICRO and nano air vehicles (MAV‘s / NAV‘s) — defined as aircraft with total mass less than 100 g and wingspans less than 15 cm [1-4] — are the subject of intense research and development. Despite major advances, M/NAV‘s still present significant trade-offs between payload mass, flight range, and speed. Currently, the principal limiting factors are the energy and power density of existing fuel sources and the complexity of flight dynamics in very small flyers. Insects have flight performance (as measured by distance and speed vs. payload and maneuverability) unmatched by man-made craft of similar size. Moreover, both the flight dynamics and the neurophysiology of insects are increasingly well understood [5-15]. In biology, the ability to control insect flight would be useful for studies of insect communication, mating behavior and flight energetics, and for studying the foraging behavior of insect predators such as birds, as has been done with terrestrial robots [16]. In engineering, electronically-controllable insects could be useful models for insect-mimicing M/NAV‘s [17-19]. Furthermore, tetherless, electrically-controllable insects themselves could be used as M/NAV‘s and serve as couriers to locations not easily accessible to humans or terrestrial robots. Flight control of insects ideally requires the triggering of flight initiation and cessation as well as the free-flight Vo Doan Tat Thang, Zhang Chao, and Hirotaka Sato, School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Svetoslav Kolev, Travis L. Massey, Pieter Abbeel, and Michel M. Maharbiz, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley, USA Huynh Ngoc Anh, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore adjustment of orientation with three degrees of freedom [8]. These flight parameters are controlled by insects via modulation of the wing movements using flight muscles. Insects exhibit two major categories of flight muscular control [9]. Some insects, such as dragonflies and locusts, possess synchronous flight muscles which oscillate under direct flight control with one-to-one matches between neuronal stimulus episodes and wing muscle contractions. Other species (e.g. Hymenoptera, Diptera, Coleoptera), possess asynchronous flight muscles which oscillate under indirect control. In these species, motor neurons to the flight muscles fire at much lower frequencies than the wing oscillation frequencies, and neuronal output serves to turn flight on and off, and to modulate power, but not to directly control each flight muscle contraction [10-12]. Beetles (Coleoptera) include some of the largest of all insect species and thus have relatively high potential for load carriage; we chose Cotinis texana (ca. 2 cm, 1 g) and Mecynorhina torquata (ca. 6 cm, 8 g) because they were large enough to carry the microsystem presented here, and could be easily reared in the lab (both species were capable of flying with 20 – 30% body weight) We chose to attempt to start, stop and modulate wing oscillations using direct electrical stimulus of the brain. Turns require asymmetric output from wing muscles [15]. We attempted control of turns by asymmetric electrical stimulus of the basalar muscles, one of the major indirect flight muscles of these beetles [11, 12, 20]. II. EXPERIMENT The remote control system used two microcontrollers (6 x 6 mm, 130 mg, 2.4 GHz); one acting as the beetle-mounted RF receiver and one as the computer-driven RF transmitter base station. We manufactured custom PCB‘s (16 x 13 mm, 500 mg) for the receiver. A programmed microcontroller was mounted on the PCB as shown in Fig. 1. The microcontroller was powered by a rechargeable micro lithium-polymer-battery (Micro Avionics, 4 V, 8.5 mAh, 350 mg). We employed Mecynorhina torquata beetle (ca. 10 g, 7 cm, 3.0 gram payload capacity) as the insect platform. The assembly was mounted on the beetle‘s posterior pronotum (Fig. 1) and glued with beeswax. The terminals of 6 output wires from the assembly were inserted into the left and right optic lobes, brain, posterior pronotum, left and right basalar flight muscles (Fig. 2). Cyborg Insect: Insect Machine Hybrid System for Locomotion Control Vo Doan Tat Thang, Svetoslav Kolev, Huynh Ngoc Anh, Zhang Chao, Travis L. Massey, Pieter Abbeel, Michel M. Maharbiz, and Hirotaka Sato M International Conference on Innovations in Engineering and Technology (ICIET'2013) Dec. 25-26, 2013 Bangkok (Thailand) http://dx.doi.org/10.15242/IIE.E1213583 142