Designing a Bat-Inspired Robot for Confined Space Exploration
ECE Associate Professor Alireza Ramezani developed a bat-inspired robot called Aerobat that can navigate tight spaces, opening up new possibilities for exploration and inspection in confined environments. Ramezani published his research on “A morphology-centered view towards describing bats dynamically versatile wing conformations” in The International Journal of Robotics Research.
This article originally appeared on Northeastern Global News. It was published by Cody Mello-Klein.
This robot flies like a bat to navigate tight spaces. Its creator says it could revolutionize how we explore the world
Using the complex wing structure of bats as inspiration, this Northeastern University professor developed an aerial robot that can fit into and navigate the small, cramped spaces that are problematic for most drones.
Alireza Ramezani doesn’t just enjoy watching bats—he enjoys building them.
Aerobat, the latest of Ramezani’s robots to take inspiration from the animal kingdom, is small but mighty, and that’s by design. Ramezani, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern University, says Aerobat solves a problem in robotics: navigating tight, confined spaces.
Aerobat, the latest robot developed by Alireza Ramezani, a Northeastern associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, is designed to navigate tight spaces with dynamically morphing wings. Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University
Ramezani says there are currently very few effective ways to explore spaces like sewer tunnels or HVAC pipes using robots. Ground-based robots move too slowly, and small aerial drones, the kind of quadcopters that are frequently deployed, are not designed to navigate confined spaces. Their rotors produce powerful, continuous air jets, which is great for flying outside but makes the robot unstable in a small space.
Enter Aerobat, a small, autonomous robot with the wings of a bat that can hover in tight spaces—and unlock entirely new ways of exploring our world in the process.
“We’ve got 1.2 million miles of sewer galleries just in the U.S. that are not easy to access, not safe, and they are not the most desirable environments where we as human operators want to be operating,” Ramezani says. “We have mines, we have caves for exploring natural resources. The point is we are surrounded by confined environments, and we don’t have fast robots that can help us with remote sensing and other applications.”
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Aerobat currently is designed to hover, but the team of researchers behind the robot’s design plan on expanding its suite of capabilities. Photos by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University
But why bats? Ramezani says bats, the only flying mammals on Earth, can manipulate their wings and control their flight better than almost any animal, including birds. They can also “manipulate their fluidic environment in a way that quadcopters cannot,” he adds.
The core concept behind Aerobat’s wing design is based on a bat’s ability to morph, or “dynamically reshape,” the configuration of its wings. Bat Bot, a prototype version of Aerobat that was unveiled in 2017, lacked this dynamic morphing capability, but Ramezani has since learned more lessons from his flying, nocturnal muses.
Read full story at Northeastern Global News