{"id":2132,"date":"2022-04-30T19:53:23","date_gmt":"2022-04-30T23:53:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/biomechanics-in-the-wild\/?p=2132"},"modified":"2023-08-22T13:39:32","modified_gmt":"2023-08-22T17:39:32","slug":"bat-flight-inspired-flapping-wing-robots-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/biomechanics-in-the-wild\/2022\/04\/30\/bat-flight-inspired-flapping-wing-robots-design\/","title":{"rendered":"Bat Flight Inspired Flapping Wing Robots Design"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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You might be familiar with fixed-wing drones, which are popular for filming and photographing. But have you thought about the bio-inspired flapping-wing robots? Researchers who study how bats fly are trying to apply the knowledge to the development of next-gen flying robots. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

You may ask, what\u2019s the advantage of bio-inspired flapping-wing robots? Compared with fixed-wing robots, flapping-wing robots have decreased mechanical complexity and reduced system mass (Wood et al. 2010<\/a>, Ma et al. 2013<\/a>). In other words, the flapping robots are optimized for building smaller and quieter drones in the future.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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\"Drone
Fig. 1. Drone hoverr. <\/em>Courtesy of: Yuhan Chang on Unsplash<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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In nature, many animal species can both fly and glide. Amid them, bats are unique because they are the only mammal that can perform a true and sustained flight. Bats are more skillful than most birds, and they use their flying capability to prey, escape from predators, and migrate (U.S. Department of the Interior<\/a>). Interestingly, bat wings are highly adapted forelimbs covered with skin membranes. They use the left and right \u201chands\u201d for flight. Imagine if you could fly using your enlarged hands, where thin-stretchable skin is in between your fingers. That experience would be like Harry Potter\u2019s quidditch performance! In a nutshell, the unique wing structure and flapping motion suggest the possible solution of a novel flying mechanism (Science daily<\/a>).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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\"Bat
Fig. 2. Bat flying<\/em>. Courtesy of: Aeromechanics & Evolutionary Morphology Lab<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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\"Drawings
Fig. 3. Wing twist and fold. (a) a live animal bat wing with markers. (b) 3D reconstructed bat wing model.<\/em> Courtesy of: Xiaozhou Fan<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Dynamic
Fig. 4. Dynamic wing-body system<\/em>. Courtesy of: Xiaozhou Fan<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Recently, researchers observed that wing twisting and folding motions play critical roles during the bat fly motion (Fig. 3). Based on this, they built a new dynamic wing-body system with wing twist and fold capabilities (Fig. 4). Next, they ran simulations to test the impact of twist and fold on aerodynamics at different flying velocities. The result shows that wing fold and twist motions reduce the negative lift and thrust during the flight. They also found a folding angle equal to 45\u00b0 is most energetically beneficial for the flapping-wing robots (Fan et al. 2021<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the future direction, they built a physical model and planned to test the aerodynamics feedback of twisting motion in the wind tunnel. As shown in Fig 5. With this mechanical model, more experimental measurements would be obtained as validation for the current computational model.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"Schematic
Fig 5. Physical model to study bat flight<\/em>. (a) A schematic for design.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Front
(b) The frontal view of the physical model<\/em>. Courtesy of: Xiaozhou Fan<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Featured image cropped from Flying Bat<\/a> by Piefke La Belle<\/a> licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You might be familiar with fixed-wing drones, which are popular for filming and photographing. But have you thought about the bio-inspired flapping-wing robots? Researchers who study how bats fly are trying to apply the knowledge to the development of next-gen flying robots.  You might be familiar with fixed-wing drones, which are popular for filming and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4194,"featured_media":3309,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[505477,505447],"tags":[380449,353229,44245,353941],"class_list":["post-2132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2022-spring","category-text","tag-bio-inspired-design","tag-flying","tag-robots","tag-wings-fins"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/biomechanics-in-the-wild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/biomechanics-in-the-wild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/biomechanics-in-the-wild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/biomechanics-in-the-wild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4194"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/biomechanics-in-the-wild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2132"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/biomechanics-in-the-wild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2132\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3310,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/biomechanics-in-the-wild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2132\/revisions\/3310"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/biomechanics-in-the-wild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/biomechanics-in-the-wild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/biomechanics-in-the-wild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/biomechanics-in-the-wild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}