"Pity the lowly humans. They're grounded, and to make matters worse, on two legs instead of four. Bats are the true heroes around here—the only mammals to master powered flight. They're so graceful and helpful, hoovering up all those insects mid-flight.
It was destined, then, that envious humans would harness the bat's powers in a fantastical new robot, which scientists introduced to the world earlier this week. Although the Bat Bot, or B2 for brevity's sake, doesn't yet have the greatest of battery lives, it's an impressive feat of engineering with big implications for how designers build the drones of the future.
Birds may be the most numerous fliers, but the bat is an evolutionary marvel. The bones supporting each wing are actually crazy long digits, of all things, covered with a thin membrane. This gives it a flexibility that birds can't touch, gifting the bat with unbelievable maneuverability to intercept insects on the wing.
That elegance requires some complicated engineering, though. A bat's wings have more than 40 joints, but the researchers whittled that to nine—five of them controlled by mini-motors and four that are merely passive. This is fascinating from an evolutionary perspective: Natural selection settled on a far more complex system, but science was able to simplify things while retaining the functionality.
Beyond maneuverability, a fixed wing also is far more efficient than, say, a quadcopter. "We don't have to run the motors constantly because we can get lift out of the wings, so it can be more energy efficient," says Caltech aerospace roboticist Soon-Jo Chung, one of the bot's developers.
That efficiency and agility could be huge for rescue operations. At the moment, quadcopters don't get along with tight spaces like collapsed buildings. "You have to be able to fly without GPS because you're underground, and you've got a lot of metal and rebar and you don't have a lot of light," says rescue roboticist Robin Murphy of Texas A&M…"
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surprises her grandmother on her 80th birthday.
