UAV Design Inspired by Movement of Birds

Birds have the capacity to move between stable and unstable flight. See how University of Michigan engineers are trying to apply that natural capability to technology.

“Researchers working on morphing aircraft have long quoted bird flight as a motivation. Christina’s unique background and subsequent research has helped put such claims into analytical terms, making a precise science out of avian flight and how it relates to morphing UAVs,” said Daniel Inman  , the Harm Buning Collegiate Professor of Aerospace Engineering at U-M.

Transcript

00:00:02 we are moving towards more urbanized uav deployment we're seeing them need to navigate through cluttered environments or need to react on really gusty days we see birds doing this regularly and they can supersede our modern uavs largely due to their maneuverability it's been thought for several decades that everything about bird flight would

00:00:21 be unstable and that that lack of stability is what conferred to them high maneuverability and what we found was evidence that evolution is not selecting towards just unstable flight but birds have the capacity to move between stable and unstable flight most birds are able to actually adapt a configuration that's either passively stable which allows them to kind of reject gusts and

00:00:42 maintain a stable flight position but they can then adapt other configurations of their wing that conversely make them very unstable and hence very maneuverable the basic piece that really like underlays all of this work was development of our software which is called av inertia it takes in measurements of the length of the bird the length of the tail the length of the

00:01:01 torso the mass of the legs and then with this information you model things with simple shapes because we know the simple shape center of gravity and the moment of inertia you can then use traditional techniques to just combine them as those masses move during wing morphing of all the different components in the wing the stability of the bird as a whole can be

00:01:22 altered we can then take that information and and use it for human-designed aircraft anything that might be engineered to have a wing that could dynamically change its shape might be inspired by the fundamental biology that that we appreciate from birds evolution really could tell us something that's beneficial for aircraft design if we can then incorporate into these uavs

00:01:42 that we're trying to deploy in these more urban areas or these more gusty environments maybe that's where we'd start to see change you