Researchers at the University of Cincinnati are using a $700K grant to study albatross flight, aiming to create drones for long flights.
UC Assistant Professor Sameh Elsa and his research partners are working on a novel project – designing drones inspired by albatrosses. Known as one of the largest birds on earth, they have 11-foot wingspans that help them fly across oceans.
Professor Eisa is particularly inspired by how these birds use their wings to fly for long times without flapping them. He has also received a $700K grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, part of the U.S. Department of Defense, to develop innovations in unmanned aerial vehicles using animal-inspired engineering called biomimicry.Dynamic soaring: The principle that helps albatrosses flyDynamic soaring plays a crucial role in mapping both distance and time for albatrosses. Eisa and his team of researchers have developed system mimicking this principle, calling it ‘a natural extremum-seeking system’.Albatrosses are known for flying in the sky using wind instead of flapping their wings. They first turn into the wind, like a sailboat, to gain height and catch faster air currents. When they start slowing down, they turn and glide forward, using both gravity and the wind to speed up. Near the water’s surface, they turn into the wind again and repeat the cycle — staying in the air for hours without flapping once.The observations“They use it skillfully. That’s the only way they can sustain such long flights,” Eisa said. “GPS trackers show these birds can fly hundreds of miles a week. By the time they die, they’ve flown 20 times the distance between the Earth and the moon,” he continued. He also shed light on the deeper insights of their flight, pointing out how albatrosses use their sensitive nose, which allows them to make fine flight adjustments. Eisa has also tested birds’ abilities to navigate in simulations, finding that even advanced computers couldn’t plan a better flight path in real-time. “They are solving an optimization problem that is unbelievably complicated,” Eisa said. “They make it look natural and easy,” he said.“A few seconds of data can take 100 seconds to generate. And albatrosses are doing it in real time with a high level of accuracy. It seems implausible,” he continued.“For a drone to fly like an albatross and achieve autonomous soaring, it will have to measure both changing wind speeds and direction to calculate the best angle of attack and rolling action to adjust flight controls in real time, he said. If we can get closer to how the albatross does it, we can be more efficient,” he said.The challengesWind is the traditional energy of drones. However, the project aims to convert this into an advantage. Eisa has described dynamic soaring as a principle that allows birds to always find the best possible flight conditions. Using this idea, the team will design new flight controls so drones can copy the albatross’ flying style in real time.They will use these designs with DARPA’s industry partners to see exactly how much more energy-efficient this method is compared to normal drone flight.“I think flying is fascinating. It’s something we always yearn to do because we can’t do it. That’s one reason biomimicry has been such an important tool for aerospace engineers,” he said. “Nature has been optimizing flight for millions of years of evolution,” he continued. “So to take this gift from nature and make it available to humanity is engineering at its best.”
Aviation Biomimicry Bird Drone Drone Technology UAV Uavs
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