Robotic Bat Wing Could Lead to Flapping-Wing Applications

An eight-inch robot mimics bat anatomy with plastic bones carefully fabricated on a 3-D printer to match proportions of a real bat.

In a press release dated February 20, 2013, Brown University announced building a robotic bat wing, intended to study wing shape and motion. “The strong, flapping flight of bats offers great possibilities for the design of small aircraft, among other applications. By building a robotic bat wing, Brown researchers have uncovered flight secrets of real bats: the function of ligaments, the elasticity of skin, the structural support of musculature, skeletal flexibility, upstroke, downstroke.”

A paper describing the robot and presenting results from preliminary experiments is published in the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics. The work was done in labs of Brown professors Kenneth Breuer and Sharon Swartz, who are the senior authors on the paper. Breuer, an engineer, and Swartz, a biologist, have studied bat flight and anatomy for years. Joseph Bahlman, a graduate student at Brown, led the project. The press release noted that now that the model is operational, Bahlman has lots of plans for it. “The next step is to start playing with the materials,” he said. “We’d like to try different wing materials, different amounts of flexibility on the bones, looking to see if there are beneficial tradeoffs in these material properties.”