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.

A bat, though, is a natural in such an environment. (You know, that whole cave thing.) Outfitted with the right sensors and autonomy, a bat bot could search rubble for trapped humans a quadcopter could never reach. After all, if you clip a wall with a drone, that's it. You're done. “One of the nice things about that morphing sort of wing,” says Murphy, “and what’s great about bats and birds in general, is they don’t mind a little bit of a collision.” A flexible wing just might recover from an impact.

And at just 3 ounces, the bat bot is one seriously lightweight flying machine. That, too, is a pivotal consideration for rescue operations: The lighter the robot, the more weight it can afford to carry. "Anything you can do to increase the payload and maneuverability—that's really where the research is going," says roboticist Michael McCarthy of the University of California, Irvine.

But don’t expect the bat bots of the future to look exactly like bats. This is about optimal functionality, not perfect mimicry. “One thing maybe is that even if it's a fixed-wing aircraft with a propeller, maybe it can have this folding wing kind of mechanism,” says Chung. “So then it could make much sharper turns.”

After all, Batman flies like a bat but still looks like a man.