There are other major technological hurdles for robot makers to overcome. The short battery life and the sounds the robot makes could prove that hummingbirds are robots. It’s difficult to incorporate responses to sensory information into robots, such as how a hummingbird responds to the scent of a flower or the sight of a praying mantis.
Another major obstacle to reproducing hummingbird flight is their unique wind adaptation: gust tolerance.
“Drones don’t like wind, so we like to fly them on calm days,” said Moble Benedict, who is developing robots based on research similar to that of Tobalske’s lab at Texas A&M University. say. “For birds, it’s quite the opposite. On windy days you see more in the sky. They’re not trying to fight the wind, they’re flying with it.”
This is especially important because turbulence is increasing as the climate warms.
In one study on perturbations in a flight laboratory, doctoral student Remy Delplanche placed a Eurasian-collared pigeon with a small rare-earth magnet on its back inside a wind tunnel between two other magnets. It was placed in As the bird flew and the camera recorded it, the magnet activated and threw the bird off course.
The researchers filmed the experiment to analyze how quickly and reflexively the birds recovered, in a matter of seconds. At some point, we may be able to design robots that can catch the wind and keep flying, but we’re not there yet.
Insects, especially hawk moths, bumblebees, and dragonflies, can also serve as models for robots. Small robots are most likely to be used as spies, such as a hawk-moth perched on a flower on a restaurant patio to spy on enemies eating dinner.
In the 2002 dystopian film Minority Report, based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, a swarm of heat-seeking robot spiders attempts to find Tom Cruise’s character hidden in a bath of ice water. Appeared.
Experts say it’s possible to develop a Hummer robot that can fly like the real thing, but it’s still years away.
“Ultimately I think so,” Dr. Tobalske said. Achieving that feat would take a considerable amount of time and money, and even that could take 10 or 20 years, he estimated.
“It might be a lot easier to think about raising hummingbirds and training them in small backpacks,” he joked.
