

Photo: Breuer and Swartz labs/Brown University

The Batwing is still a few years off, but researchers have got the basics down with this robotic bat wing:

Bat wings are complex things. They span most of the length of a bat’s body, from shoulder to foot. They are supported and moved by two arm bones and five finger-like digits. Over those bones is a super-elastic skin that can stretch up to 400 percent without tearing. The eight-inch robot mimics that anatomy with plastic bones carefully fabricated on a 3-D printer to match proportions of a real bat. The skin is made of a silicone elastomer. The joints are actuated by servo motors that pull on tendon-like cables, which in turn pull on the joints.

The robot doesn’t quite match the complexity of a real bat’s wing, which has 25 joints and 34 degrees of freedom. An exact simulation isn’t feasible given today’s technology and wouldn’t be desirable anyway, Bahlman said. Part of why the model is useful is that it distills bat flapping down to five fundamental parameters: flapping frequency, flapping amplitude, the angle of the flap relative to the ground, the amount of time used for the downstroke, and the extent to which the wings can fold back.

Experimental data aside, Bahlman said there were many lessons learned just in building the robot and getting it to work properly. “We learned a lot about how bats work from trying to duplicate them and having things go wrong,” he said.