Saturday, February 23, 2013

Bat-Robot Sheds Light on Flapping Flight

We’ve had robots inspired by cheetahs, sand fleas, geckos and birds. Now engineers at Brown University have built a robot inspired by the bat.

It doesn’t fly on its own yet the robo-bat is still attached to a kind of arm in a wind tunnel. It does, however, mimic the wing shape and motion of the lesser dog-faced fruit bat. The robot itself is linked to a device called a force transducer, which records the amount of energy needed to move the wings and the aerodynamic forces on their structure.

Besides understanding how bats fly, data collected from experiments with the robo-bat could tell engineers how to design small robots that flap a pair of wings instead of fly with propellers or rotors.

Robots Mimic Disappearing Cockroaches

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