Front Cover Spotlight:

This image is provided by Michael Wilkinson, a PhD student in Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, and sourced from the Comparative Neural Systems and Behavior Lab (aka Bat Lab) at Johns Hopkins. The image depicts a big brown bat using echolocation calls to track meal worms on a moving tether.

These bats are excellent hunters and use their high frequency echolocations, which are well above the human range of hearing (we hear from about 20 Hz to 20 kHz), to precisely locate moving insects in the wild. By making sounds and then listening to how they bounce back to them, the bats can navigate and find food in complete darkness. The chart below the bat shows the frequencies contained in each echolocation call (red vertical lines) which range from 20 kHz to 120 kHz.

Michael’s goal is to understand the way bats control their echolocations while they track insects, and how this control allows the bat to accurately know the location of their future dinners. He applies methods from engineering and control theory to model the connection between echolocation changes and target motion. Michael hopes these models can be used in future to inform the creation of better acoustic-based tracking systems and robotics.