New Delhi: Scientists have come up with a new bat-inspired flying robot which can possibly mimic the the mechanisms of flying mammals.
Bats have long captured the imaginations of scientists and engineers with their unrivalled agility and manoeuvring 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.
"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," said Alireza Ramezani, a researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the US.
"It weighs only 93 grams, with dynamic wing articulations and wing conformations similar to those of biological bats," said Ramezani.
"Our work introduces a design scheme to mimic the key flight mechanisms of biological bats," said Soon-Jo Chung, a research scientist at the NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
"There is no well-established methodology for reverse engineering the sophisticated locomotion of bats," Chung said.
(With PTI inputs)
