The new EPFL drone design was inspired by a bird

EPFL’s Intelligent Systems Laboratory engineers have designed a new drone inspired by a bird of prey. When researchers say raptor, they’re not talking about a dinosaur or the Ford pickup. They are talking about a bird of prey. Specifically, the northern goshawk. A northern goshawk is a fast, powerful bird that is able to effortlessly fly through forests.

The bird was the inspiration for the next-generation drones seen in the images, and to design it, researchers carefully studied the shape of the bird’s wings and tail and its flight behavior. That behavior was used to develop a drone with similar characteristics.

Enrico Ajanic is the first author of the research study and graduate student in the laboratory of Dario Floreano. According to Ajanic, the goshawk moves its wings and tail in tandem to create the desired motion from quick changes of direction when hunting in the forest to fast flying when chasing prey in open terrain. The bird is also able to glide efficiently to save energy. The drone design extracts the principles from the agile flight of birds, creating a drone that comes close to the flight performance of a raptor.

The drone created in the laboratory also tests the biological hypothesis that a morphing tail plays an important role in achieving fast turns, deceleration and slow flight. In 2016, engineers created a bird-inspired drone with a morphing wing. The new drone is a step forward with the ability to change the shape of the wing and tail thanks to the artificial feathers incorporated into both. Ajanic says it was complicated to build and design the mechanisms, but scientists improved the wing so that the drone behaved more like the goshawk.

The drone can change the shape of the wing and tail to change direction faster, fly slower without falling from the sky, and reduce the air resistance when flying fast. It is clear in the images that the drone uses a propeller for thrust rather than flapping its wings. Researchers say the helix is ​​more efficient. A big advantage of this design over a quadcopter is that the bird-inspired drone can fly for a long time while being almost as agile as a quadcopter. The researchers note that flying the drone is complicated due to all possible tail and wing configurations. They intend to integrate AI into the final design by allowing the drone to fly semi-automatically.