Mostafa Hassanalian, Mechanical engineering professor, New Mexico Tech, said: "We came up with this idea that we can use and re-engineer birds and dead birds and make them as a drone. And the only thing that we need to provide them to make them alive is to basically design an attrition mechanism put in their body, and everything is there."
"So we do reverse engineering. We'll calculate what has been the weight of the bird while it was alive, what has been its flapping frequency, what flapping angle they have flapped and just create something similar."
The aim is for the drones to blend in with a flock of living birds.
Brenden Herkenhoff, PhD student, New Mexico Tech, said: “And we've done experiments and determined that for fixed-wing aircraft, applying certain colors can change the flight efficiency. And the same is true for birds, we believe. And we're now doing studies specifically on flapping wing drones to study how the coloration of bird wings and how the color patterns affect the potential flight efficiency."
Experiments are run in a drone cage with fake mechanical birds. It allows the study of the formation and flight of migratory birds.
Mostafa Hassanalian, added: “So it's basically, if we learn how they, how these birds, they manage the energy between themselves, we can apply them into the future aviation industry to save more energy and save more fuel, and which would be more economics in the future in aviation industry."
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