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About

Pierre-Emile J. Duhamel is a pioneering researcher in the field of insect-scale robotics, specializing in the design, control, and autonomous flight of flapping-wing microrobots. His work bridges biology and engineering, drawing inspiration from insect flight to create sub-gram aerial vehicles. Duhamel’s major contributions include the first successful demonstration of on-board altitude sensing for feedback control in a flapping-wing microrobot, achieved with a 33-mg optical-flow sensor integrated into a 68-mg flyer (63 citations). He also developed model-free control strategies for stable hovering, enabling autonomous flight without complex system models (33 and 17 citations). A standout achievement is his fully integrated system-on-chip (SoC) in 40-nm CMOS, which meets the extreme weight, power, and real-time demands of bee-sized robots for closed-loop control (24 citations). Duhamel’s work has laid critical groundwork for autonomous pico-aerial vehicles, with potential applications in environmental monitoring, search-and-rescue, and precision agriculture. His innovations in miniaturized sensing, control, and power integration represent a significant leap toward practical, insect-inspired flying robots.