The evolution of bats is characterized by a combination of two key innovations - powered flight and biosonar - that are unique among mammals. Bats still outperform engineered systems in both capabilities by a large margin. Bat biosonar stands out for its ability to encode and extract sensory information using various mechanisms such as adaptive beam width control, dynamic sound emission and reception, as well as cognitive processes. Due to the highly integrated and sophisticated design of their active sonar system, bats can survive in complex and dense environments using just a few simple smart acoustic elements. On the sound emission side, significant features that distinguish bats from the current man-made sonar system are the time-variant shapes of the noseleaves. Noseleaves are baffles that surround the nostrils in bats with nasal pulse emission such as horseshoe bats and can undergo non-rigid deformations large enough to affect their acoustic properties significantly. Behavioral studies have shown that these movements are not random byproducts, but are due to specific muscular action. To understand the underlying physical and engineering principles of the dynamic sensing in horseshoe bats, two experimental prototypes ,i.e. intact noseleaf and simplified noseleaf, have been used. We have integrated techniques of data acquisition, instrument control, additive manufacturing, signal processing, airborne acoustics, 3D modeling and image processing to facilitate this research. 3D models of horseshoe bat noseleaves were obtained by tomographic imaging, reconstructed, and modified in the digital domain to meet the needs of additive manufacturing prototype. Nostrils and anterior leaf were abstracted as an elliptical outlet and a concave baffle in the other prototype. As a reference, a circular outlet and a straight baffle designed. A data acquisition and instrument control system has been developed and integrated with transducers to characterize the dynamic emission system acoustically as well as actuators for recreating the dynamics of the horseshoe bat noseleaf. A conical horn and tube waveguide was designed to couple the loudspeaker to the outlet of bat noseleaf and simplified baffles. A pan-tilt was used to characterize the acoustic properties of the deforming prototypes over direction. By using those techniques, the dynamic effect of the noseleaf was reproduced and characterized. It was suggested that the lancet rotation induced both beam-gain and beamwidth changes. Narrow outlet produced an isotropic beampattern and concave baffle had a significant time-variant and frequency-variant effect with just a small displacement. All those results cast light on the possible functions of the biological morphology and provided new thoughts on the engineering device's design. / Ph. D.

Horseshoe bats possess a sophisticated biosonar system that helps them to negotiate complex unstructured environments by relying primarily on the sound as the far sense. For this, the bats emit brief ultrasonic pulses and listen to incoming echoes to learn about the environment. The sites of emission and reception in these bats are surrounded by baffle structures called "noseleaves" and "pinnae (outer ears)". These are the the only places in the biosonar system where direction-dependent information gets encoded. These baffle structures in bats unlike the engineering systems like megaphones have complex static geometry and can undergo fast deformations at the time of pulse emission/reception. However, the functional significance of the baffle motions in biosonar system is not known. The current work primarily focuses on: i) the study of the impact of noseleaf dynamics on the outgoing sound waves, ii) the study of the impact of baffle dynamics on encoding of sensory information and localization performance of bats. For this, we take a numerical approach where we use computer-animated digital models of bat noseleaves that mimic noseleaf dynamics as observed in bats. The shapes are acoustically characterized (beampatterns) numerically using a finite element implementation. These beampatterns are then analyzed using an information-theoretic approach. The followings findings were obtained: i) noseleaf dynamics altered the spatial distribution of energy, ii) baffle dynamics results in encoding of new sensory information, and iii) the new sensory information encoded due to baffle dynamics significantly improves the performance of biosonar system on the two target localization tasks evaluated here -- direction resolution and direction estimation accuracy. These results affirm the importance of dynamics in biosonar system of horseshoe bats and point at the possibility of biosonar dynamics as a key factor behind the astounding sensory capabilities of these animals that are not yet matched by engineering systems. Thus, these biosonar dynamic principles can help improve the man-made sensing systems and help close the performance gap between active sensing in biology and in engineering. / Ph. D.