Using a custom-made silicon skin and articulated morphing wings, Soon-Jo Chung and researchers from UIUC created Bat Bot (B2), an autonomous flying robot that mimics the flight characteristics of real bats.
Bats have long captured the imaginations of scientists and engineers with their unrivaled agility and maneuvering characteristics, achieved by functionally versatile dynamic wing conformations as well as more than forty active and passive joints on the wings. However, their wing flexibility and complex wing kinematics pose significant technological challenges for robot modelling, design, and control.
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Caltech have developed a self-contained robotic bat—dubbed Bat Bot (B2)—with soft, articulated wings that can mimic the key flight mechanisms of biological bats.
“Our work demonstrates one of the most advanced designs to date of a self-contained flapping-winged aerial robot with bat morphology that is able to perform autonomous flight,” explained Alireza Ramezani, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois who is the first author of the cover article, “A Biomimetic Robotic Platform to Study Flight Specializations of Bats,” appearing in AAAS Science Robotics on February 1. “It weighs only 93 grams, with dynamic wing articulations and wing conformations similar to those of biological bats.”
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“In addition to construction applications, we envision robotic flapping-wing robots operating in tight quarters with humans and beyond where humans can go,” Chung noted. For example, an aerial robot equipped with a radiation detector, 3D camera system, and temperature and humidity sensors could inspect something like the Fukushima nuclear reactors, where the radiation level is too high for humans, or fly into tight crawlspaces such as mines or collapsed buildings. Such highly maneuverable aerial robots, with longer flight endurance, will also make advances in the monitoring and recovery of critical infrastructures such as nuclear reactors, power grids, bridges, and borders.
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“Finally, this robot can contribute to biological studies on bat flight,” Hutchinson added. “The existing methods for biology rely on vision-based motion capture systems that utilize high speed imaging sensors to record the trajectory of joints and limbs during bat flight. Although these approaches can effectively analyze the joint kinematics of bat wings in flight, they cannot help understand how specific wing movement patterns contribute to a particular flight maneuver of a bat. B2 can be used to reconstruct flight maneuvers of bats by applying wing movement patterns observed in bat flight, thereby helping us understand the role of the dominant degrees of freedom of bats.”
Read the journal study published in Science Robotics here.
Source:
ECE ILLINOIS Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
https://www.ece.illinois.edu/