A group of scientists just built the first robot drone that looks and flies like a bat and aptly named it, Bat Bot.
Bat Bot, could easily be called an engineering spectacle. It weights roughly about 3.3 ounces with a silicone film stretching over its carbon fiber skeleton; with chip possessing an on-board computer and sensors on its head and five petite motors strung along its vertebrae.
Designed by a trio of Roboticists led by Soon-Jo Chung at Caltech, it was unveiled earlier today in the renowned journal, Science Robotics.
Bat Bot is remarkable in the sense, that it is - the only - mechanized unit that perfectly mimics a bats natural flying pattern. "Arguably, bats have the most sophisticated powered flight mechanism among animals," the roboticists write in their paper.
Bats use more than 40 active and passive joints along the flexible membranes of their wings. To build Bat Bot, Chungs team first had to do away with the idea that they could simply just mechanize the flapping of bat wings, joint by joint; as he said It's impractical, or impossible, to incorporate [all 40] of these joints in the robot's design. Even with today's most advanced robotic technology, you'd just end up with a heavy, clunky robot that would never make it off the ground.
In lieu of it, the trio extensively went over biological studies of bat flights to understand which of the 40-some joints they could do away with and which were pivotal to the success of the experiment.
Ultimately, Chungs flying bot ended up having a total of nine joints and doesnt have knuckle joints in its fingers and does not actively twist its wrists unlike the way an actual bat does.
There are other simplifications too. While bats' wing membranes can have different levels of stiffness in different places, Bat Bot's hyper-thin, silicone membrane (which Chung's team built themselves) is uniformly flexible.
Nonetheless, Bat Bots exquisite flight looks almost identical to that of an actual bat. If the spectator is not a biologist, the differences in the flight pattern are indistinguishable.
Even cooler, Bat Bot is not remote controlled. Leveraging a lightweight suite of sensors and computers, it can autonomously perform a flapping glide, bank turns, and sharp dives. Bat Bot is not perfectyet as it cannot yet ascend in the air; it can only flap its way through a controlled glide amongst other things.
Chung's team contends that Bat Bot's gentleness and lack of rapid-spinning propellers make it safer around humans in comparison with other flying robots. Chung imagines that future manifestations of Bat Bot could come to be airborne around new building sites mid-construction, settled on beams to take photos, or to identify mistakes or other structural flaws.
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