Inside Unmanned Systems provides actionable business intelligence to decision-makers and influencers operating within the global UAS community. Features include analysis of key technologies, policy/regulatory developments and new product design.
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36 unmanned systems inside January/February 2016 AIR RESEARCH WANT MORE? For more information on the work Professor Soon-Jo Chung is doing to design a robotic falcon to keep birds away from airplanes, and for videos of these drones in action, visit insideunmannedsystems.com. We have to understand the function of what the bird does and try to adapt that to our engineering structures.˝ –Aimy Wissa, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign " Using bat-inspired drones to monitor construction projects Associate Professor Soon-Jo Chung, along with other researchers, is working to develop a robotic bat, known as the B2 or Bat Bot, that can be used in a complex environment like a construction site. These robotic bats will be able to provide surveillance to help managers ensure projects are following plans and keeping to the schedule. "We need to add small, lightweight sensors to all these bird and bat-inspired f ying vehicles and then come up with control and sensing algorithms that can safely maneuver the aircraft," Chung said. "They'll f y around and monitor the construction site and relay information in real time to the leadership and construction workers. They won't have noisy high speed drones f ying around." The 92 gram bat-inspired vehicles will be able to glide, land and perch, so they won't constantly hover over the site—yet they'll still record information through the stationary camera. Eventually, the platform might not even need to look like a bat, Chung said. It can become a hybrid system that's smaller, safer and more eff cient than the drones designed for this type of application today. "We think nature offers a lot of solutions to cur- rent engineering problems," said Aimy Wissa, as- sistant professor in the Department of Mechani- cal Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. "The same UAS can't perform all the tasks a bird can, includ- ing taking off, hovering, perching, landing and cruising. Birds can do all these things efficiently, where UAS are based on point design. They're good at one thing but not the other. That's the reason we work on adaptive structures." Making a Bird Drone Developing a bird-inspired UAS isn't easy, Wissa said, and requires a multi-disciplinary approach— an approach she sees becoming the future of UAS. Biologists, engineers and roboticists must work together to create these complicated platforms. The challenges begin with the bird wing. Wings are made up of 44 muscles in a coupled structure, Wissa explained. Birds use that complicated structure to change the wing—deploying their feathers, for example—for a variety of reasons. "We can't just mimic what birds do and hope it works," said Wissa, who is also the director at the university's Adaptive Morphology Lab. "Birds look and act the way they do for many reasons. A feather has color for reproductive reasons or has different layers to keep birds warm. Those things don't concern us when developing a UAS. We have to understand the function of what the bird does and try to adapt that to our engineering structures." Ty Hedrick, a biologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studies birds and was part of a team that developed a bird- inspired UAS. He began studying birds through wind tunnel f lights, but these tests presented maneuverability and speed limitations. Over the last few years, he has taken his research outside to study birds in their natu- ral environment, watching swallows chase each other at high speeds as they maneuver through trees and other obstacles. This re- search helped the team, which includes re- searchers from MIT and the University of