Working principles of Drones

The nature is an awesome place for inspiration for discoveries and inventions for many things that is existing in this world. Take an example of the aeroplane. It was inspired by the birds flocking in the air. And there are millions of examples in day to day life.

The recent research on drones is based on one of the findings of the nature. Few birds want their territories defined. They ensure that no other bird would occupy their territory. Sometimes there are fights between the two flocks. One such incident inspired the researches. The swallow fight noticed by the researchers was near the cliff regions. The manoeuvring of the birds were swift and reflex. They deep dived in the air with the force ranging up to 7.8-g. This is much larger than the roller coaster itself, whose highest gravitational force( called as "g force") is in South Africa having 6.3g. The swallows performed various turns which were extreme in nature much to the incapability of the human pilot.

So researchers wanted to build a drone which could perform the same moves as that of the swallows. The researchers placed the high speed camera which could capture about 100 frames per second. The camera captured the movements of the wing at each angle when it was performing the manoeuvre. The feather movement, its wing direction, its body direction along with the movement of the tail was noted down. Even the wind direction and its speed was noted down for better analysis.

After this study they found out many important facts. Every feather is used as an aero¬dynamic sensor. When the wind pushes against these sensors, they send nerve signals to the brain and trigger reflexive movements. Each gust is like a finger prick that causes birds to instinctively contort their wing shape, which is known as actuation, to relieve the strain.

So the researches are trying to figure out the basic principles of the swallow to be implemented in the drones. They recreated the wings of the bird using synthetic materials and attached it as an appendages of the drones. The drones are then tested to take advantage of the course of the wind to minimise the fuel factor and increase the efficiency.

Push broom studio is one such example. The computer program uses two small cameras on a drone to scan the space about five meters in front of the drone. When an obstacle appears, push broom temporarily remembers the object's position so the drone can evade it. Initial flights were manually piloted, but researchers are confident that the system could autonomously avoid the obstacles, as well. Once past, its memory banks forget the obstacle. This amnesia means that engineers can use smaller computers for piloting, which translates into smaller drones.

So almost all the future drones will be on this concept. The drones will be able to dodge any obstacle, move between the two posts, calculate the distance and will be able to pass through narrow passages. In future it will involve a mix of all fields from mathematics, physics, material science to name a few.

The scientists are doing research on how the birds are able to migrate in large numbers to particular areas during winters in their part. Extensive research has to be done to replicate the same in our world to know the weather patterns and climatic effect on large scale. If it becomes a success then we might be able to unleash many secrets of nature still hidden behind.