A team of roboticists from Caltech and Urbana-Champaign have built a biomimetic “bat bot” that uses nine joints to deform a foot-wide wing membrane to achieve breathtaking aerial maneuvers.
Biomimicry is a tough row to hoe: the weird solutions that are optimized by evolution have strange complexities that we rarely completely understand. But starting with nature’s designs can yield amazing results – as with the Bat Bot, where the bat’s normal complement of 40 joints have been replaced with a mere 9.
