Fellowship focus: Developing animal-inspired gliding robots to monitor the ecosystem.
Robots that can launch, glide and perch like animals could allow us to monitor and protect ecosystems in inaccessible areas such as forest canopies, but developing these robots is challenging because we know surprisingly little about the gliding behaviours of animals in the wild. Dr Khandelwal will bring eight years of experience studying flying lizards in the Indian rainforest to inform the design of a new bioinspired gliding robot in collaboration with Dr Siddall (an expert in robotic systems) and an interdisciplinary team of biologists, conservationists and engineers. A key aim will be creating a framework for deploying robotic systems in real-world conservation tasks.