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It’s not a bird. It’s not a plane. It’s not even superman. But it flies better than any of them. It’s the barn bat — that stealth pilot of the night. And it could soon be teaching airplanes big and small how to fly.
Neuroscientists at Columbia University, Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland have been studying the way their colony of big brown bats flies. And they think today’s small crafts and drones could take a hint from their more fleshy fliers. The scientists say not only the way bats move, but also the way they process information — from the tips of their fingers to the core of their nervous system — could have applications for small unmanned drones and large commercial airliners.
Bats are known for their impressive lift and maneuvering capabilities that far outperform most of their fellow air travelers. But this new research also suggests the way their brain works could help design better mechanical flight. That’s because they use information from special sensors in their wings to help them decide where to go very quickly and efficiently.
“Because they are such agile fliers, they’re a great model to understand how the nervous system brings together information,” says Kara Marshall, one of the neuroscientists at Columbia University studying the bats.
One reason the bats fly so efficiently is that they aren’t doing as much of their thinking ‘in their head’ — that is — they don’t organize information about airflow coming in from their wings in the typical top-down way. Instead of routing all their sensory information to the brain, they put that information to use right away, and adapt their flight.
“The organization of their nervous system is different” says Ellen Lumpkin, a biophysicist at Columbia.
The researchers are now working with engineers to develop more bat-informed drones and small, unmanned aircrafts.
“Biology has solved the problem of how to make small maneuverable aircraft simply,” Lumpkin says, “biology manages to fly much more efficiently than any human-made aircraft.”
Bats use their wings similar to the way we use our hands (after all, they’re mammals too, even down to their own bat fingers). Just as our fingertips detect touch differently than the palm of our hand, researchers believe the bats use small concentrations of sensors on the leading edge of their wings to detect airflow, while their thumbs and fingertips contain more cells that are used to sense objects.
Researchers at Brown invented a robotic wing for small aircraft based on their bat research in 2013.
Susanne Sterbing-D'Angelo, an Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University who’s also studying the bats, says the way bats process sensory information when they fly could also have applications for bigger commercial aircraft.
She points to catastrophic crashes — the Air France flight from Rio de Janeiro in 2009 and the Air Asia flight that crashed on the way to Singapore last December. Sterbring-D’Angelo says more bat-like biometric sensors embedded on the surface of planes could potentially assist in preventing these types of stalls. D’Angelo says with more sensors tracking airflow from different places around the plane, there could be less of a chance for fatal errors.
For now, Sterbing-D'Angelo’s experimenting on a smaller scale. She’s 3-D printing large polymer fiber hairs. The robust plastic hairs will be mounted on a sensor chip and placed on different parts of small, unmanned aircraft wings, to measure air flow from different places on the wing, delivering information about air speed and directionality.
As drones and small aircrafts become more ubiquitous, bats aren’t the only winged creatures engineers are looking to for clues about how to perfect unmanned flight. Russ Teadrake, a robotics and aeronautics professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says his team’s been looking at how birds make sight-based decisions in “high-performance” flight.
It’s all in an effort to make better videos, deliveries, and maybe, some day, an even safer flight for you.
