How tiny bat-inspired drones could save lives in dark and stormy conditions
By Associated Press | Published: 2025-11-02 18:50:00 | Source: Inc.com
Don’t be fooled by the fog machine, scary lights, and fake bats: Worcester Polytechnic Institute’s robotics lab isn’t hosting a Halloween party.
Instead, it serves as a proving ground for small drones that can be deployed on search and rescue missions even in dark, smoky or stormy conditions.
“We all know that when there’s an earthquake or a tsunami, the first thing that goes down is the power lines. A lot of times, it’s at night, and you’re not waiting until the next morning to go and rescue the survivors,” said Nitin Sanket, assistant professor of robotics engineering. “So we started looking at nature. Is there a creature in the world that can actually do this?
Sankett and his students found their answer in bats and the highly evolved ability of winged mammals to echolocate, or navigate by reflected sound. Through a grant from the National Science Foundation, they are developing small, inexpensive, energy-efficient aerial robots that can be flown wherever and whenever current drones cannot.
Last month, emergency workers in Pakistan used drones to find people stranded on rooftops Massive floods. In August, a rescue team used a drone to find a man from California Besieged for two days← Behind the waterfall. In July, drones helped find a stable route to… Three miners Who spent over 60 hours trapped underground in Canada.
But while drones are becoming more common in search and rescue operations, Sanket and researchers elsewhere want to move beyond the individual, manually operated robots in use today. The next major step is developing aerial robots that can be deployed in swarms and make their own decisions about where to search, said Ryan Williams, an associate professor at Virginia Tech.
“This type of deployment — autonomous drones — is virtually nothing,” he said.
Williams addressed this problem with a recent project that involved programming drones to choose search paths in coordination with human searchers. Among other things, his team used historical data from thousands of missing person cases to create a model that predicts how someone would behave if lost in the woods.
“We then used this model to better determine the location of our drones, to look at locations that had a higher chance of finding someone,” he said.
At WPI, the Sanket project addresses other limitations of current drones, including their size and perception capabilities.
“Current robots are big, bulky and expensive and cannot work in all types of scenarios,” he said.
By contrast, his drone fits in the palm of his hand, is made mostly of inexpensive materials and can operate in the dark. A small ultrasonic sensor, not unlike those used in automatic faucets in public restrooms, mimics the behavior of a bat, sending out a high-frequency sonic pulse and using the echo to detect obstacles in its path.
During the final demonstration, a student used a remote control to launch the drone into a brightly lit room and then again after turning off all the dimly glowing red lights. As it approached a clear glass wall, the drone repeatedly stopped and backed away, even with the lights off and with fog and fake snow in the air.
“Right now, search and rescue robots operate mainly in daylight,” Sanket said. “The problem is that search and rescue operations are boring, dangerous and dirty tasks that often take place in the dark.”
But the development did not go completely smoothly. Researchers realized that the noise of the bat robot’s propellers interfered with ultrasound, requiring 3D-printed casings to reduce the interference. They also used artificial intelligence to teach the drone how to filter and interpret audio signals.
However, we still have a long way to go for match bats, which can contract and compress their muscles to listen only for certain echoes, and can detect something as small as a human hair from several meters away.
“Bats are amazing,” Sankett said. “We are nowhere near what nature has achieved. But the goal is that one day in the future, we will be there and these will be useful for deployment in the wild.”
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(Tags for translation)Artificial Intelligence
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