Robo-falcon ready to keep airport’s flying pests at bay
CANADA: Next month a pilot will arrive at an airport in Canada to launch a new breed of robotic drone: a small mechanical bird with fast flapping wings that flies and swoops and generally scares the living daylights out of starlings and songbirds.
The Robird will be flown around Edmonton airport in Alberta in what is said to be the first deployment of a mechanical falcon to clear birds from the flight paths of a main airport.
The pilot, who has been trained to fly the bird by remote control and in the rudiments of falconry, will send the drone on courses that mimic a predator’s flight.
The mechanical bird will also be programmed to ensure that it does not stray into flight paths.
‘‘Electronics on board can assist the pilot so that it does not cross a fixed altitude ceiling,’’ Wessel Straatman, an engineer at the Dutch company that developed the bird, said.
Nico Nijenhuis created the drone as part of his graduate studies at the University of Twente. Making a flapping, flying bird was a difficult proposition.
‘‘From a scientific point of view, we don’t truly understand flapping wing-flight,’’ he told Wired magazine in 2014.
‘‘What a bird actually does is so complex that it’s incredibly difficult to mimic.’’
He gave his bird foam wings that can bend in flight, with the tips arcing down, software to stabilise it in flight and a body that can withstand crashes at 80kmh.
Initially it was developed as a toy, Straatman, of Clear Flight Solutions, said, The company then began to realise that birds were struggling to distinguish it from a predator.
‘‘Ornithologists confirmed to us that birds’ typical response when they see our Robird flying is exactly similar to their response to a falcon,’’ he said.
This opened up a career for the Robird as a 21st-century scarecrow. Birds become accustomed to fixed-wing drones, but Straatman said that small birds can not become accustomed to the Robird because its profile is so close to that of a falcon.
‘‘If they did there are always real predatory birds who would take advantage of this,’’ he said. ‘‘From an evolutionary standpoint they can never get used to it.’’ - The Times