Birds are masters
of maneuverability
in ways that we are only
beginning to understand.
Birds can dramatically change
the shape of their wings
almost instantly and
respond in that way
very quickly to
flying in turbulence,
avoiding obstacles, and
also flying very effectively
over long distances.
Here we are in front of a
brand new bird wind tunnel.
It's a wind tunnel
in which we can
study how birds fly up
close so that we can learn
the magic of flight and
translate it into better flying
robots.
What's great about it is that we
can vary the speed of the wind
very precisely, from very close
to 0 meters per second, all
the way through to about
50 meters per second,
which is very fast.
The tunnel is designed to
be super low turbulence,
but we also want to study
how birds fly in turbulence
and how we design vehicles that
are more stable in turbulence.
So we also have this
turbulence generation system.
We can actually not only control
how strong the turbulence is,
but where the turbulence
is in the tunnel.
Bird are flying at 10 minutes
per second, but in our lab,
they're basically not moving.
Because it's still in the
same little test section,
we could use a lot of
our other lab equipment,
like our high speed
cameras and our motion
tracking devices to
measure all the kinematics
and forces that it's generating
without needing to use up
a large expanse of
space that would
be necessary without
the wind tunnel.
I've been working with both
lovebirds and parrotlets.
The technique we use is
all positive reinforcement
for voluntary flights.
That way, we're getting
calm, natural flights
as they would be in their
natural environment.
Studen
Students are super
excited to figure out
what is it that
enables birds to fly
under these complex
conditions and how can we
translate what we find
into developing robots
that can be used for
delivery, search and rescue,
any application in
an urban environment
where conditions like winds
are really unpredictable?
For more, please visit
us at stanford.edu.
