Researchers decided to make drones from the bodies of dead birds.
Brown pelicans fly at dawn over the Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge, a major stop for birds on the Pacific Flyway, on June 23, 2006, near Calipatria, California.
The New Mexico Tech (New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology) researchers were the ones who came up with this idea.
Dr. Mostafa Hassanalian, a mechanical engineering professor who is leading the peculiar dead bird drone project, shared how they developed these UAVs.
Dr. Hassanalian explained that he noticed that winged drones are less efficient compared to real birds. This is how they got the idea of using dead bird bodies to create drones.
Researchers Make Drones From Dead Birds!
According to New York Post's latest report, Hassanalian and his team decided to give dead birds a new life by turning them into drones.
A dead seagull floats over oiled waters in the bay of Ancon while investigators from the Peruvian National Service of Natural Areas Protected by the State (SERNANP) assess contamination levels and mortality rate of wildlife on the coast of Ancon, 35 kilometers north of Lima on January 29, 2022.
"Now we can use re-engineered birds and dead birds and make them a drone," said Dr. Mostafa. "And the only thing that we need to provide them to make them alive is to basically design an attrition mechanism, put in their body, and everything is there," he added.
Since the dead birds still have tails, heads, and wings, they need to reverse-engineer them.
As they turned these dead flying animals into drones, they calculated their flapping frequency, weight, and flapping angle when they were alive.
How Dead Bird Drones Help Aviation Industry
Hassanalian and his team said that these new dead bird drones could help them conduct more efficient studies about birds.
They can fly these drones with flocks of birds, allowing them to understand how they make their formations, how they maintain their flights, and how they migrate to long-distance places.
However, their dead bird drones still can't fly with the real flock. As of press time, they are still running experiments where their dead bird-based UAVs fly in a drone cage with fake mechanical birds.
Using dead animals to create drones and other machines is no longer new. In 2022, The Verge stated that dead spiders were used to create robot-gripping claws.
If you want to learn more about these dead spider robots, you can click here.
In other stories, vision in blind mice was recently restored using the new CRISPR technology. We also reported about a new study where scientists altered human cells to act like squid skin cells.
For more news updates about birds and other animals, always keep your tabs open here at TechTimes.
Related Article: 'Fairy Robots' Powered by Wind, Light May One Day Become Artificial Pollinators
