HELLO FUTURE: The Bat Bots — How Nature’s Night Flyers Are Inspiring Rescue Robots

Just in time for Halloween, Kevin Cirilli takes flight into the shadows with Dr. Nitin Sanket, assistant professor of robotics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute — whose lab is building tiny flying robots that navigate like bats. Forget broomsticks and ghosts — these real-life “bat bots” use sound and echolocation to find people trapped in smoke, fog, or darkness, where human rescuers — and even drones — can’t see. Funded by the National Science Foundation, Dr. Sanket’s team is designing ultra-light, sound-guided robots powered by AI that can swarm into collapsed buildings, wildfires, or disaster zones — navigating purely through sound, like a colony of digital bats. Kevin and Dr. Sanket explore how nature’s oldest flyers are inspiring the next generation of autonomous rescue tech, what it means for the future of disaster response, and why these “creatures of the night” might just become heroes of the light.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
Just in time for Halloween. The batbots are taking over.
That's right, These miniature, creepy crawlers inspired by bats are
actually helping first responders on rescue missions. Hello Future, it's
me keV. This is a dispatch from the Digital Frontier.
The year is twenty twenty five. The planet is Earth.
My name is Kevin Sireli, and my guest today is
an engineering robotics professor at Worcester Polytech Institute. Doctor Nitton

(00:34):
Sunket Goddess, PhD in Computer science from the University of Maryland,
College Park, and an MS in robotics from the University
of Pennsylvania. He knows a thing or two about the
robot All right, Nitten, thank you so much for joining us.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
What is this?

Speaker 1 (00:48):
I saw this on the news the other day and
I couldn't even believe what I was seeing. Bats are
now going to be robots.

Speaker 3 (00:56):
Yeah, it's my pleasure joining you up. It's not the
battle robots. We are inspired by bats.

Speaker 4 (01:03):
We are trying to mimic bat's mastery of flight in darkness, snow, smoke,
and so on.

Speaker 1 (01:10):
Why bats, Why do we think that that is so interesting?

Speaker 4 (01:15):
I would say, like bats are amazing at flying in
really hard conditions. They live in damp, dusty dark case.
There is no other living agent which lives in that
kind of environment and actually fly that effortlessly.

Speaker 1 (01:31):
You know, I think when people hear robots right now,
they think of humanoids. But the big thread right now
is that you're saying that people who are making robots
should be inspired by nature, which kind of feels like
a science fiction novel come to life.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:45):
I would like to believe that as well.

Speaker 4 (01:47):
I think nature has cracked the code for doing really
hard things very well over the last few millions of years,
and I think we can take a note or two
from that, and I think that's what we are trying
to do.

Speaker 1 (01:59):
So how but like, what does nature do better than
robots and how do we mimic it? And why should
the average person care about that?

Speaker 2 (02:07):
Yeah, that's a great question.

Speaker 4 (02:09):
So generally search and rescue happens in the night and
power lines are locked down.

Speaker 2 (02:14):
We cannot wait until the next day morning to.

Speaker 4 (02:17):
Go save someone because it might be like really time critical, right,
And these happen in like dusty environments, dark environments.

Speaker 2 (02:25):
In really harsh conditions.

Speaker 4 (02:27):
We were looking at nature, how nature can solve this
because we didn't have any solutions because we don't have
anything that can do that. Great bats can do this effortlessly.
We were like, okay, let's look at them. They use
ultrasound instead of like vision to basically locate where.

Speaker 2 (02:43):
Things are around around the bat.

Speaker 4 (02:46):
Itself, and we are trying to get that idea of
equal location, and we are trying to mimic what we.

Speaker 2 (02:52):
Can do for obstacle awaridance on aerial robots.

Speaker 1 (02:55):
So the hardest thing that I would imagine is that
the bats hang out in the cave. Where would ease
bats be stored if it's a robot bat. I mean,
a bat's not going to go fly around in a
thunderstorm or when there's bad nature conditions. How do you
think through the environmental concerns and like the charging concerns
for lack of a better word, because you know, animals

(03:17):
have animal instinct that can get them out of the
way for that, but I'm assuming robots don't necessarily have
those capabilities yet.

Speaker 3 (03:24):
Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, our goal is
basically very simple.

Speaker 4 (03:28):
Imagine as such an rescue worker, they have like a
small briefcase with like twenty to thirty of these robots.
They can just go to the field, open the suitcase
and press a button and you should be able to
deploy these robots into the wild to be able to
find survivors. And that's what we're envisioning.

Speaker 1 (03:44):
It's honestly like that movie Twister. I don't know if
you've ever seen that, where in the first one or
the sequel where she drives into the center of the
twister to release these little robotic things to track the weather.
You're saying that a first response in the future would
show up like in a James Bond movie with a
briefcase would packed with little robotic bats things and just

(04:09):
unleash them like a like a kid on Christmas with
a with a robotic car or a drone. That's fascinating.
I want to get from bats to for Halloween. We'll
go right into the holiday season. Your bio says, sir,
something that I very much disagree with and that my
dog would like to have a word with you on,
which is that one day humans will have robotic pets.

(04:32):
So do you think that in the future people will
have pets as robots.

Speaker 2 (04:37):
I would like to believe so.

Speaker 4 (04:38):
I think it's like if people don't want to have
living things, but they just want to have the comfort.

Speaker 3 (04:44):
Robots might be a good option. Rights that's the way
I see it.

Speaker 1 (04:47):
See, I totally disagree with you, and my dog would
totally disagree with you. I love my dog. I would
never want to have a robot. I do think it's
interesting this idea of forming a relationship with a piece
of technology. I think whether we all culturally in the
Life Mexicon, we all say, oh, I'm addicted to my phone,
you know, we just think about that, Oh, I have
my phone everywhere. I don't think the average human thinks

(05:07):
of that as a relationship with their phone, just more
of an extension of themselves. So I'm curious, and I've
we'd cover robots on this program all the time, and
just how there's I think I think it was one
of the big banks. So there's going to be a
billion humanoid robots on planet Earth in the next you know,
twenty years or so, or about the year twenty fifty

(05:28):
or whatever. The idea of having like a personal human
interaction with a robot or a piece of technology, that's
interesting to me. And that's a really big idea. I
think humans are used to forming relationships with animals, even
like your dog or your cat, or a pet you
have you have a certain human pet relationship, or when

(05:50):
you go to the zoo and you you evoke an emotion.
But the fact of getting an emotion from a robot
is really interesting to me. What sector do you think
that is because even when you go to the grocery
store and you see the rudimentary robots, you know, cleaning
the aisles or whatever, you're not thinking of that thing
as a person. How far away are we from having

(06:13):
that type of human emotional reaction to robots that you
are predicting.

Speaker 2 (06:17):
Oh, that's a great question.

Speaker 4 (06:18):
I would say we are fairly far away from that.
I don't think the robots today.

Speaker 3 (06:23):
Have the emotional connect with the human being.

Speaker 4 (06:26):
As in, like the way they behave with the humans
is not the same way like you were saying, like,
that's right, let's have a beautiful body language, so we
get accustomed to that. Like they don't speak the language
we do, right, but they interact with us in fundamental
non verbal base.

Speaker 3 (06:41):
I don't think robots yet possess those capabilities. I know
a lot of my colleagues are working on things like that. Yeah,
I think the future is going to be interesting, and
it's going to be.

Speaker 2 (06:51):
Beyond what we can imagine today. That's what I would
like to say.

Speaker 1 (06:54):
It is really awesome. Well, thank you so much for
coming on the show. Thanks for explaining that bots and pets,
robots and all of this stuff. It's fascinating, fascinating work
you're doing. And appreciate your time.

Speaker 3 (07:06):
Yeah, thank you so much.