![]() ![]() However, he discovered that a quadrotor drone was just as effective as the biomimicking robot. One of the researchers, Soon-Jo Chung worked on an earlier bird-control project to build a flapping robot mimicking the flight of a falcon to use as a natural-looking deterrent. The positioning has to be precise, however: if the external threat gets too zealous and rushes at the flock, the birds will panic and act individually, not collectively. Effective herding requires an external threat - in this case, the drone - to position itself in such a way that it encourages birds along the edge of a flock to make course changes that then affect the birds nearest to them, who affect birds farther into the flock, and so on, until the entire flock changes course. Each bird in a flock reacts to changes in the behaviour of the birds nearest to it. Successful herding depends on the ability to keep a flock together while shifting its direction of travel. It the drone got too close, the flock could scatter and become uncontrollable.īird behaviour Image – The presence of the drone will affect the behaviour of the closest bird which will fly closer to the next bird which, in turn, will affect the behaviour of the rest of the swarm. If the UAV was too far away, then it did not affect the behaviour of the flock. Looking in more detail at bird behaviour, the scientists concluded that using a piloted drone to herd birds away from an airspace varied in success depending on the position of the drone. Inspired by the 2009 ‘Miracle on the Hudson’ incident involving US Airways Flight 1549, the researchers looked into ways that airspace could be protected from birds by using technology in autonomy and robotics. ![]() A recent study published in IEEE Transactions on Robotics (1) ( ) describes a project developed by CalTech, Imperial College London and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), which allows a single drone to herd an entire flock of birds away from an area of airspace without harming individual birds or the flock’s formation. (IEEE)ĭrones are also being deployed more scientifically not to scare birds away but to herd them away from sensitive areas – such as airports. Image – The aim of the research into robotic herding was to keep flocks of birds away from restricted areas. These vary from passive methods, such as removing physical features from airports that attract birds, which provide food sources or areas of water to land on, deploying netting or spikes to discourage birds from roosting, displaying effigies of predators, loud noises, pyrotechnics, chemical repellents or using trained raptors. Since the majority of incidents occur during take-offs and landings, deterrence methods have concentrated on various methods to discourage birds from being near airports. ![]() To avoid the risk of bird strikes, many methods have been devised to try to discourage birds from flying near airports. Fortunately, thanks to the skill of pilots Chesley Sullenberger and Jeffrey Skiles, there was no loss of life. The most well-publicised bird strike incident of recent years was the US Airways’ A320 which ditched into the Hudson River in 2009 after it lost power in both engines after flying into a flock of geese. Even in these cases, the aircraft was usually able to continue to fly and returned safely to an airport but there have been incidents in which aircraft have been brought down by bird strikes. In some cases, the damage done by bird strikes is minor but in others, it is sufficient to adversely affect the safety of the aircraft – particularly in incidents in which larger birds were sucked into engines and caused them to flameout. According to figures published by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) there were 142,000 wild-life strikes at US airports between 19, with birds being involved in 97% of the reported cases. It is a well-known maxim that birds and aircraft don’t mix. ![]() CAA-reported birdstrikes from 2012 to 2016. ![]()
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