$200,000 from Hyundai awarded to Brown’s Bat flight and Aeromechanics Laboratory

Starting Phase III of the Brown-Hyundai Research Collaboration, Hyundai awarded $200,000 to a research team jointly led by Dr. Kenny Breuer in Engineering and Dr. Sharon Swartz in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Their collaborative team will develop an enhanced understanding of bat flight and apply it to the modeling and design of flying robots.

This award comes at the end of a 1.5 year process which began with the Hyundai Visionary Challenge. Led by Alberto Bortoni and Xiaozhou Fan, PhD candidates in EEB and Engineering respectively, and undergrad neuroscience and biology concentrator Undergrad Alexander (Sascha) Morris - the team, successfully competed in the fall of 2018, and presented at the Hyundai Mobility Innovators Challenge that November. This past fall, Alberto and Xiaozhou returned to San Francisco to share the team's vision for how bat flight can inform the future of drone technology.