'Chirocopter' Drone Flies Within Bat Swarms

A research team from Saint Mary's College has created a 'Chirocopter' - named after Chiroptera, the scientific name for bats. The drone is equipped with a microphone to record echolocation chirps, the sounds that bats use to navigate, and a thermal camera that can 'see' bats by detecting their body heat. The Chirocopter can be placed anywhere in 3D space, the team reports this month in Science  .

Transcript

00:00:00 Wildlife biologists have designed a drone that can hover within swarms of bats as they zip across the nighttime sky. The drone is equipped with a microphone to record echolocation chirps and a thermal camera that can “see” bats’ body heat. The microphone is insulated with foam that allows it to pick up high-pitched chirps over the noise of the drone

00:00:26 and prevents it from reflecting back the chirps. Similar technology has been used to record bats from the ground and from towers, but the chiro-copter has the advantage that it can be placed anywhere in 3D space. In testing, the team maneuvered the drone to hover in the middle of a bat swarm In one 84-min recording, they recorded at heights ranging from 5 m to 50 m. There were so many bats

00:00:53 that they recorded 46 chirps/minute. By monitoring swarms from the air, the researchers hope that they’ll be able to figure out how the fast-flying mammals avoid colliding. (No bats collided with the drone during the testing.)