| Topic: | Bats as a Paragon for Autonomy in Natural Environments |
|---|---|
| Speaker: | Prof Rolf Mueller Director, BIST Center; Department of Mechanical Engineering, Virginia Tech |
| Date: | Tuesday, 12 November 2019 |
| Time: | 3.00pm to 4.00pm |
| Venue: | Seminar Room E1-06-09  (Block E1, Level 6) (map of NUS can be found at http://map.nus.edu.sg/) |
| Host: | Asst Prof Adrian Koh |
Abstract
Bats are an extraordinary evolutionary success story that has created the second most species-rich group among all mammals (about 1400 species or 20% of all mammalian species). This success is likely due to a unique combination of active biosonar sensing and powered flight that has given bats the ability to sense their environments independently of ambient light as well as virtually unrestricted mobility in three dimensions. The integrated sensing and locomotion systems of bats provide an excellent model for autonomous systems that could deal with complex natural environments in the future. The biosonar systems of bats are much more parsimonious than their engineered peers. Whereas engineered sonar is based on arrays with many emitting and receiving elements, bat biosonar functions with just one emitter (mouth or nose) and two receivers (the two ears). What the bat biosonars lacks in element-number, they make up in terms of in-built smartness. In bat families with particularly sophisticated biosonar systems such as the horseshoe bats and the Old-World leaf-nosed bats, the emission (noseleaves) and the receiving baffles (outer ears) are embedded with numerous muscles that enable the bats to perform fast deformations of the noseleaves and outer ears that coincide with the emission of the pulses/the reception of the echoes. It can be shown that these dynamic properties of the bat biosonar periphery result in time-variant echo signatures that encode of additional, useful sensory information. Similar to bat biosonar, the powered flight of bats has much to offer to engineering. To investigate how bats can realize their superb maneuverability, energy efficiency, and load-carrying capacity, a high-speed video camera has been established to track an unprecedented number of landmark points (around 350). The kinematics data from this array has been used to create detailed digital models of a flying bat that have informed computational fluid dynamics simulations. Future work will address the integration of biosonar sensing and powered flight as a paragon for engineered systems to replicate the sensorimotor skills of bats.
About the Speaker
Rolf Mueller has studied various aspects of bat biosonar from the perspectives of biophysics and bioinspired engineering for almost 20 years and has (co)authored over 100 peer-reviewed, full-length publications on the topic. In particular, he has worked on statistical signal processing of sonar signals in complex, natural environments, biosonar beamforming, as well as biomimetic sonar systems. The focus areas of his current research are the extraction of adaptive design rules analysis from biodiversity, bioinspired dynamic principles for sensing, and the kinematics of bat flight. He is currently a professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Virginia Tech and directs the Bioinspired Science and Technology (BIST) Center, an interdisciplinary effort with 42 faculty members from across the university. In his international efforts, he directs the Shandong University – Virginia Tech International Laboratory that is dedicated to the engineering analysis of biosonar, flight, and system integration in bats. His international work has been recognized by the Friendship Award of the People’s Republic of China (2010), the Dean’s Award of the VT College of Engineering (2011), and Virginia Tech’s Alumni Award for International Research (2016).