Scientists Build Robotic Bat Wing
Posted on February 21, 2013
Researchers at Brown University have built a robotic bat wing. The robotic bat wing is pictured next to a real fruit bat in the above photograph. The robotic bat wing is designed to flap while attached to a force transducer in a wind tunnel. The force transducer records the aerodynamic forces generated by the wing. The researchers say the robotic wing helps them collect data that could not be collected with a real bat.
Joseph Bahlman, a graduate student at Brown who led the project, said in a statement, "We can't ask a bat to flap at a frequency of eight hertz then raise it to nine hertz so we can see what difference that makes. They don't really cooperate that way."
Take a look:
A research paper about the robotic wing was published here in the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics.