In recent years, researchers worldwide have been trying to develop computational techniques that reproduce behaviors of humans or animals in robots and machines. This includes, for instance, the structure and functioning of the human brain, the swarm communication ability of bees, the locomotion styles of specific species of fishes or amphibians, and much more.
Building on the achievements of previous studies, researchers at Virginia Tech and the University of Maryland have recently introduced a simulation framework that could be used to recreate bat behavior in quad-rotor UAVs. This model, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, was born out of a collaboration between Rolf Müller, an expert in biosonar sensing, statisticians Xiaowei Wu and Hongxiao Zhu, and computer scientist Pratap Tokekar, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).