A new generation of ultralight drone has been designed using flapping wings, as opposed to rigid ones, or rotating propellers. Alireza Ramezan, a roboticist at Boston's Northeastern University, devised the UAV after studying nature and hopes it could one day be used to enhance modern life by pollinating crops, collecting weather data and monitoring traffic. They may even function as'guardians of future cities', monitoring elderly people who live alone, or by working with the emergency services. Mimic: The Bat Bot has highly stretchable silicone-based membrane wings that are controlled by number of joints, much like the creature it's inspired by'There will be these machines that are round the clock doing monitoring and providing information,' says Dr Ramezani. 'We can think of them as the guardians of future cities.' Dr Ramezani came up with the idea after studying how bats take 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."

CalTech and university of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers have created a robot that mimics bat flight. Bat wings have intrigued scientists for centuries. And now, engineers have created "Bat Bot," a small aircraft that mimics the flight patterns of the small, rodent-like flyers. Bat Bot exposes the complicated mechanics of bat flight and simultaneously provides clues into how to make better aerial drones. Bat Bot is a remix on an ornithopter, a machine that uses flapping wings to take flight as opposed a propeller or a balloon.

Mechanical masterminds have spawned the Bat Bot, a soaring, sweeping and diving robot that may eventually fly circles around other drones. Because it mimics the unique and more flexible way bats fly, this 3-ounce prototype could do a better and safer job getting into disaster sites and scoping out construction zones than bulky drones with spinning rotors, said the three authors of a study released yesterday in the journal Science Robotics. For example, it would have been ideal for going inside the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, said study co-author Seth Hutchinson, an engineering professor at the University of Illinois. The bat robot flaps its wings for better aerial maneuvers, glides to save energy and dive bombs when needed. Eventually, the researchers hope to have it perch upside down like the real thing, but that will have to wait for the robot's sequel. Like the fictional crime fighter Batman, the researchers turned to the flying mammal for inspiration.

Mechanical masterminds have spawned the Bat Bot, a soaring, sweeping and diving robot that may eventually fly circles around other drones. Because it mimics the unique and more flexible way bats fly, this 3-ounce (85-gram) prototype could do a better and safer job getting into disaster sites and scoping out construction zones than bulky drones with spinning rotors, said the three authors of a study released Wednesday in the journal Science Robotics. For example, it would have been ideal for going inside the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, said study co-author Seth Hutchinson, an engineering professor at the University of Illinois. The bat robot flaps its wings for better aerial maneuvers, glides to save energy and dive bombs when needed. Eventually, the researchers hope to have it perch upside down like the real thing, but that will have to wait for the robot's sequel.

For roboticists working in the field of biomimetics, copying a bat's complex flight patterns has been a difficult problem to solve. Or, as Caltech professor and Jet Propulsion Laboratory researcher Soon-Jo Chung put it during a press conference, "bat flight is the holy grail of aerial robotics." And according to a new research paper published by Chung and his JPL colleagues in the journal Science Robotics this week, that holy grail has officially been discovered. Robotic birds and winged insects are relatively easy to create, but with over 40 joints in their wings, bats offer a new level of intricacy. By simplifying that wing structure into just nine key joints covered by a flexible membrane, however, the team successfully created the first Bat Bot.

Mechanical masterminds have spawned the Bat Bot, a soaring, sweeping and diving robot that may eventually fly circles around other drones. Because it mimics the unique and more flexible way bats fly, this 3-ounce prototype could do a better and safer job getting into disaster sites and scoping out construction zones than bulky drones with spinning rotors, said the three authors of a study released Wednesday in the journal Science Robotics. For example, it would have been ideal for going inside the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, said study co-author Seth Hutchinson, an engineering professor at the University of Illinois. Bat Bot, a three-ounce flying robot can be more agile at getting into treacherous places than standard drones. The flying robot weighs just three ounces, and is equipped with nine joints. It measures about 8 inches from head to tail, and has a super-thin membrane that stretches to about a foot and a half.

It swoops, flaps and dives just like the animals it was designed to mimic. Inspired by the flexibility and agility of bats and their wings, a team of engineers has come up with an autonomous flying robot with the same skills – one that could ultimately be used to survey building sites from the air. Aerial robots have previously taken inspiration from insects and birds, but bats are a tougher challenge for roboticists because of their complicated skeletons and irregular flight patterns. "Bats have a very complex body morphology compared to birds or insects. Their wings are very articulated, with many joints," says team member Alireza Ramezani at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.