'Bat Bot' Flying Robot Mimics 'Ridiculously Stupid' Complexity Of Bat Flight

One of the problems with bats, if you're a robotics expert, is that they have so many joints. That's what robotics researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Caltech quickly learned when they set out to build a robot version of the flying mammal. "Bats use more than 40 active and passive joints, [along with] the flexible membranes of their wings," Soon-Jo Chung of Caltech told Popular Mechanics. "It's impractical, or impossible, to incorporate [all 40] of these joints in the robot's design." Or as biologist Dan Riskin of the University of Toronto put it to PBS, "bats are ridiculously stupid in terms of how complex they are."