ENGINEERING. PRACTICE. POLICY.
35
unmanned systems
inside
January/February 2016
Ty Hedrick of the University of North
Carolina Chapel Hill worked with a team
that included researchers from
MIT and the
University of Washington in Seattle to
to develop a UAS with the ability to avoid
obstacles like a bird. The team at Chapel
Hill field tested from March to October
last year and performed 20 days of flights.
Testing began with basic flight control and
ended with obstacle avoidance near trees.
Flights took place near trees eight of the 20
days with the aircraft successfully avoiding
obstacles during 16 of 136 flights. On
those flights the aircraft flew over
1.5km,
detected
7,951 stereo matches, executed
163 trajectories and spent 131 seconds
fl ying in autonomous mode with an average
speed of
12.1 m/s (27 MPH).
Photos courtesy of Ty Hedrick, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and
Andy Berry of MIT, who wrote his thesis based on this research
U
nmanned aircraft systems just can't
fly as well as birds do.
Despite the many design improve-
ments being made as industry strives to imple-
ment drone-based applications, even the most
advanced drones simply don't have the agility
and grace that comes so naturally to birds.
Some researchers are working to change that.
They're developing bird-inspired Unmanned
THE ADVANTAGES OF BIRD-INSPIRED DRONES.
Though small multi-rotor copters and fi xed-winged drones are the most popular
forms of unmanned aircraft systems, there are new highly maneuverable, energy
effi cient platforms emerging that take their design inspiration from the most
experienced fl yers in history—birds.
by Renee Knight
DRONES
take wing
Aircraft Systems (UAS), the more formal name
for unmanned aircraft, complete with adaptive
wing structures for enhanced maneuverabil-
ity and efficiency. They want these UAS to not
only feel the environmental conditions around
them, but to respond to those conditions—mak-
ing them even better equipped for commercial
applications ranging from crop monitoring to
search and rescue.
Researchers
including biologist
Ty Hedrick of the
Hedrick Lab at
University of North
Carolina Chapel Hill,
studied swallows to
help create a UAS
with detect and avoid
capabilities.