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A team at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in
Socorro is taking birds that have been preserved through
taxidermy and converting them into drones in order to study
flight.
Dr. Mostafa Hassanalian, a mechanical engineering professor who
is leading the project, had found that artificial, mechanical
birds had not given the results he was looking for.
"We came up with this idea that we can use ... dead birds and
make them (into) a drone," he said. "Everything is there ... we
do reverse engineering."
Taxidermy bird drones - currently being tested in a
purpose-built cage at the university - can be used to understand
better the formation and flight patterns of flocks. That in turn
can be applied to the aviation industry, said Hassanalian.
"If we learn how these birds manage ... energy between
themselves, we can apply (that) into the future aviation
industry to save more energy and save more fuel," he said.
Brenden Herkenhoff, a Ph.D. student at New Mexico Tech, focuses
his research on coloration and flight efficiency.
While many think of a bird's color as a way to attract mates or
use camouflage, Herkenhoff is studying how color affects flight
efficiency.
"We've done experiments and determined that for our fixed- wing
aircraft, applying certain color can change the flight
efficiency. And the same is true for birds, we believe," he
said.
The current taxidermy bird prototype flies for a maximum of only
20 minutes, so the next stage is to figure out how to make it
fly longer and conduct tests in the wild among living birds,
Hassanalian said.
(Reporting by Liliana Salgado in Socorro, New Mexico; Editing by
Rosalba O'Brien and Matthew Lewis)
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