We see birds every day. Peek outside your window and there’s a good chance you’ll surely find a chirpy feathered friend cruising by. Humans have studied birds for centuries, however, scientists have long struggled with replicating the flight mechanics that birds are naturally blessed with. Building a robotic bird that flies with fixed wings is very easy, but creating something that bends and flaps its wings like a real animal is surprisingly very difficult.
On that end, a team of researchers have taken a huge stride towards achieving that ambitious goal with a new artificial avian rightly called ‘PigeonBot.’ A paper published in Science Robotics describes how the researchers replicated the wings of a pigeon using a “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach to construct the bird bot. They build wings that bend at two spots, closely resembling the wings of actual birds. They noted all the angles at which real birds move during flights. To fill in the wings, they used 40 real pigeon features (taken from deceased birds, of course). To know more, read this article.