(Reuters) — Sometimes the best science is found right in nature. Engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have developed a new aerial drone based on the intricate wing anatomy of bats.
Called “Bat Bot,” the robot is the brainchild of Caltech associate professor Soon-Jo Chung, who said he wanted to find a another means for drone flight that did not involve rotor blades, which most drones use for lift.
“I was actually questioning myself, why should all those drones look the same, with high-spinning rotor blades, and they are quite noisy and sometimes very unsafe,” said Chung.
The Bat Bot has no blades. The 3 ounce (85 gram) robot is made of a carbon fiber skeleton covered with an ultra-thin, silicon-based membrane. And while a bat’s wings have 40 joints, Chung and his team were able to replicate its movements using only nine 3D printed ones: four passive, and five controlled by motors. Those motorized joints operate independently, enabling the robot to shift and contort its wings to make the hair-pin turns and pivots of the real animal.
“We are not trying to strictly mimic the bat flight. We are not proposing that all the drones in the future should look like a bat. What we are trying to say here is that maybe trying to understand some key flight mechanisms of a real bat, maybe we can translate some of them into the airplane or aircraft technologies,” said Chung.
Future applications of the Bat Bot’s technology could lead to aircraft being able to maneuver in more difficult spaces, where things like rotors and strict flight patterns would hamper drone flight.