This $390,227 Project Grant awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering program (CFDA 47.041) to Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University (Virginia Tech) aims to extract causal relationships between wing kinematics and flight maneuvers in bats. The goal is to leverage insights from bat flight to inform the design of transformational bio-inspired drones capable of navigating cluttered environments. The award supports high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis of turbulent flow fields generated by measured bat wing kinematics, which will be combined with inertial forces to predict the translational and rotational dynamics of bat flight. This will enable the identification of dominant wing kinematic traits that drive changes in trajectory during flight maneuvers. Physics-guided deep learning techniques will then be used to establish causal relationships between wing motion and trajectory changes, with the intent of applying these design principles to the development of more maneuverable, bat-inspired drone platforms. The research will be conducted over a 3-year period from July 2024 to June 2027.
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