In a lot of ways, it seems like we’re in the “plateau of productivity” part of the hype cycle when it comes to drones. UAVs have pretty much been reduced to practice and have become mostly an off-the-shelf purchase these days, with a dwindling number of experimenters pushing the envelope with custom builds, like building drones out of dead birds.
These ornithopomorphic UAVs come to us from the New Mexico Insitute of Mining and Technology, where [Mostafa Hassanalian] runs the Autonomous Flight and Aquatic Systems lab. While looking into biomimetics, [Dr. Hassanalian] hit upon the idea of using taxidermy birds as an airframe for drones. He and his team essentially reverse-engineered the birds to figure out how much payload they’d be able to handle, and added back the necessary components to make them fly again.
From the brief video in the tweet embedded below, it’s clear that they’ve come up with a huge variety of feathered drones. Some are clearly intended for testing the aerodynamics of taxidermy wings in makeshift wind tunnels, while others are designed to actually fly. Propulsion seems to run the gamut from bird-shaped RC airplanes with a propeller mounted in the beak to true ornithopters. Some of the drones clearly have a conventional fuselage with feathers added, which makes sense for testing various subsystems, like wings and tails.
It’s easy to mock something like this, and the jokes practically write themselves. But when you think about it, the argument for a flying bird-shaped robot is pretty easy to make from an animal behavior standpoint. If you want to study how birds up close while they’re flying, what better way than to send in a robot that looks similar to the other members of the flock? And besides, evolution figured out avian flight about 150 million years ago, so studying how birds do it is probably going to teach us something.
WATCH: Are you sure the birds you see in the sky aren't drones? In the near future, that may be the case pic.twitter.com/FV4v3NzuhN
— Reuters Asia (@ReutersAsia) April 14, 2023
birds aren’t real !!!!
Do you believe in real world? That’s mad. Reality do not exist man, update your info, they don’t want you to know!
https://birdsarentreal.com/pages/who-are-we
only one question, who is funding this?
More important question: will it raise a sht storm like the dead-cat quad?
Catch the frick up:
https://wyss.harvard.edu/technology/robobees-autonomous-flying-microrobots/
Why does a Klingon “Bird of Prey” resemble a goose?
Probably for the same reason prune juice is considered a “warrior’s drink” :P
Because geese will f you up.
Zombirds.
“Look!”
“Up in the sky!”
“It’s a bird!”
“It’s a plane!”
“No! It’s a Zombird!”
“Ewwwww!”
I like an avian story that ends with a tweet!
Gold Star of the Day!
Neunundneunzig Zombie-Vögel
Auf ihrem Weg zum Horizont
Hielt man fuer UFOs aus dem All ….
Band called Nena, mid 80s? Love the translated (English) version! (99 Red Ballons, or may 99 Zombie Birds)
Clarkson is right about a few things regarding the Germans. Their pop music is top of the list.
The country should be divided again.
As punishment for inventing techno/resuscitating disco.
12 pieces this time!
They could have taken up funk if they insisted on dancing. German dancing looks so much like marching the French surrender.
It must cost a bit of your humanity to cut up a dead bird and put it on a drone. Ew!
Plenty of dead birds at the local windmill farm. Least they didn’t die for nothing, and found some use for them.
Even more dead birds around any tall building, they just get routinely cleaned up (by stray cats if anything) and you don’t pay any attention to them even if you see one.
Our office has provided me with a dead grouse (dinner) and a dead kingfisher.
The latter is being stuffed and mounted as a side project of mine.
Well… it must cut a bit of your humanity to buy plastic wrapped steak and blinding yourself about the meat industry.
If you prefer it the other way around, you should consider zoroastrian funerals.
As long as they don’t poop lithium on my car.
La première chose à laquelle je pense lorsque je vois un oiseau mort n’est pas de faire un drone avec son cadavre
Same, i see Macron…
Talk about the ultimate camouflage for a kamikaze drone…
And if you kept the proportions, you could probably scale it up in size and just fly it a little higher during the target acquisition phase.
A downside would be the annihilation of the bird population in war zones since you couldn’t identify friend or foe until it’s too late.
SF operators have had bird shaped eyes in the sky for decades now.
You can even find pictures on Pakistani news sites (you could anyway, might be scrubbed). You can tell they are American because the ‘charge date’ written on the battery pack is correctly formatted and it’s using an APC folding prop.
I recall stories from a few years ago that Palestinians wouldn’t talk outside if there were birds nearby. They assumed they would actually be Israeli spy drones that looked like birds. Probably true so e of the times.
Psychological warfare.
e.g. Me flying my RC ‘predator drone’ in proximity to paranoid political group demonstrations of all kinds. Living in CA it’s a target rich environment.
Protip: Put a ringer into the demonstration to see the drone and call it out. Otherwise your time will have been wasted. Disappear the drone shortly after to avoid good pics being taken.
… with small GSM basestations on board.
I suspect that birds are scared away from a war zone anyway due to the all the loud noises.
I heard that during the Vietnam War tigers 🐅 would go towards artillery explosions to scavenge.
This has some serious Chuck Testa vibes
I use to fly some of my planes at the local model aircraft club.
I discovered a funny behavior with my planner besides a grain field in wish there were a lots of birds. When I started doing circles in the sky, all the birds suddenly took off to go elsewhere, it seems that (from a bird point of view), my plane was seen as a bird of prey. I repeated this several times, and it triggered the same behavior.
My planner is blue, and not looks like a bird. No bird killed :)
I think we need a new term for this – like “uncanny valley” but for birds?
flapcanny valley
uncanary vulture?
Next time someone asks “Do you like our owl?”, I’ll have to ask “It’s artificial?”.
20 years ago we never saw more than 1 buzzard during the summer, none the rest of the year. 5 years ago they’re everywhere over town most the year round. In the last 3 years all these turkey buzzards have been replaced by european black vultures. Was it a social thing as in “buzz off buzzard” or we are seeing BV2.0? Either bird, what an airframe for loitering and observing! Birds aren’t real focuses on pigeons not these far more suitable models. I’m also seeing more hawks even a bald eagle.
Some sad day in the future, when all of The Rolling Stones are dead and gone – they’ll use a similar technology to keep their dead bodies on tour.
I’m pretty sure they’ve already done this with Keith’s dead body.
Perhaps Mr. Praline’s ( John Cleese ) stone dead Norwegian Blue parrot with beautiful plumage could fly again… (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Parrot_sketch)