UAVsCan UAVs emulate bats’ flight capabilities?

The natural world has countless examples of creatures with extraordinary flight capabilities, but bats have evolved with truly extraordinary aerodynamic capabilities that enable them to fly in dense swarms, avoid obstacles, and fly with such agility that they can catch prey on the wing, maneuver through thick rainforests, and make high-speed 180 degree turns.

Bats possess specialized features which contribute to their flight performance, including highly articulated and flexible skeletons, flexible and compliant membrane wings, thousands of tiny hair sensors distributed over their wing surface, as well as a series of muscles embedded in the wing membrane the function of which appears to be the active control of camber during flight.

Scientists are now engaged in a multidisciplinary research, involving a team consisting primarily of researchers from biology and engineering and which includes significant collaborations with researchers in computer science and applied mathematics. These scientists all work to characterize bats’ unique flight capabilities, and to understand the roles that the bats’ bones, skin morphology, and wing motion play in enabling this behavior. The goal of the this effort is to model these mechanisms, and ultimately to emulate them in engineered systems.

A Brown University release reports that unlike insects and birds, both of which have relatively rigid wings that can move with only a few degrees of freedom, the bat’s wing comprises a thin, highly compliant skin membrane which is supported on a very flexible jointed skeleton with numerous degrees of freedom. The aerodynamics of flexible, articulated wings is extremely complex and poorly understood, and the research team is studying their characteristics by using high-speed measurements of the bat’s wing and body motion. These kinematic measurements are synchronized with Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) measurements of the fluid velocity in the wake behind the animal and, together, the kinematic and fluid measurements will shed light on the lift and thrust mechanisms that bats use during straight flight as well as maneuvers.

In support of these biological flight experiments, the researchers are performing wind tunnel tests on physical models that mimic features observed in nature, material tests on bat bones and wing membranes, numerical simulations, theoretical modeling, and advanced scientific visualizations.

The research is a joint effort between Kenny Breuer in Engineering and Sharon Swartz in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

See more information on the Web sites of Bio-Inspired Robotics and BaTboT.

The research is supported by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF).