Researchers Are Turning Taxidermied Birds Into Drones

A reliable approach to creating a machine that can walk, walk, swim, or fly like an animal is to simply copy Mother Nature’s work. There’s a good reason SPOT by Boston Dynamics looks like a dog. But to create drones the fliesRelocationand even look How birdsResearchers from New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology Are to build them from real dead birds.

Those of us who have been online in the last decade may remember the work of Dutch artist Bart Jansen, who back in 2012, filmed her deceased, groomed cat into a furry quadrocopter. It was as disturbing a creation as it sounds, but that was more or less the point of its existence. As with most artworks, it sparked conversation.

New Mexico Tech researchers have a more practical reason for reviving deceased wildlife to create their flying ornithopters: They want to build a machine that can fly by flapping its wings up and down like a bird. in one study presented recently At the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ SciTech 2023 Forum, researchers are highlighting the benefits of using real bird parts over artificial materials engineered to behave like them. With their light bodies and flexible feathers, birds can easily outmaneuver even the ablest Aircraft we’ve ever built, and that includes compact drones that can do it dash skillfully through bowling lanes.

At least in their current form, the drones that New Mexico Tech researchers created aren’talmost as agile in the air as the original. Birds use their muscles to flex and distort the shapes of their wings to perform amazing aerial maneuvers, while these drones simply flap their stiff wings up and down to stay aloft.

The greater benefit of building an ornithopter from a deceased bird is camouflage, because it looks more like the original on air and hopefully tends to be ignored. It might not be great in aerial combat, but a dead bird drone could potentially be a very useful spy tool, regardless of whether it’s used for military purposes or as Opportunity for scientists to study and observe other wildlife while ensuring their behavior remains natural and undisturbed.

The use of feathers often gives birds incredible stealth abilities as well allow them often fly into the air without making a sound. Compared to the sound of an electric motor with a spinning propeller, a dead bird drone with flapping feathered wings might be able to silently sneak up on a target without scaring it off. Although, if you think about it more closely, this scenario actually sounds a lot scarier.