Pigeons may be regarded as the rats of the sky, but scientists have found a great use for these birds: their body structure could be a blueprint for a new generation of flying machines.
Birds can modify the shape of their wings by fanning out their feathers or shuffling them closer together. Those adjustments allow birds to cut through the sky more nimbly than rigid drones.
Using this knowledge of how pigeons’ joints control the spread of their wing feathers, researchers have built a robotic pigeon, called PigeonBot, which, like a real pigeon, can change the shape of its feathered wings.
This research paves the way for creating more agile aircraft, says Dario Floreano, a roboticist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland not involved in the work.
(Image Credit: Lentink Lab/ Stanford University)
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