Pigeons’ ‘beautiful’ navigation skills studied to improve tiny spy planes

August 01, 2011|By Karen Weintraub, Globe Correspondent

Harvard researchers Ivo Ros (left) and Huai-Ti Lin attached equipment… (Talia Moore for The Boston…)

Pigeons get a bad rap - think “rats with wings’’ - but they are actually finely honed flying machines, capable of zooming around obstacles and finding their way through virgin territory with amazing ease.

Researchers at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are so impressed by the navigational skills of these creatures - along with their ability to carry tiny equipment, like backpacks and cameras - that they are trying to deconstruct how a pigeon makes its way at high speed through cluttered terrain. The results could help build better, smaller spy planes.

Researchers created an artificial forest at Harvard’s Concord Field Station (which is in Bedford), and they are recording the flight and head movements of the pigeons. People would have a hard time navigating the same kind of obstacles at comparable speeds, said Russ Tedrake, an associate professor in the electrical engineering and computer science department at MIT. It would be like hurtling down a wooded mountainside on a bike and trying to avoid the trees, he said.

“It’s really beautiful what they can do,’’ said Tedrake, principal investigator on the interdisciplinary navigation project, which is funded by the Office of Naval Research. The Navy, like other branches of the armed services, is trying to design ever-tinier spy planes that can be used to gather data without being detected. Tedrake’s team, which includes researchers from MIT, Harvard, New York University, and several other institutions, is slated to receive $7.5 million over five years.

It’s possible to build a bird-sized flying machine, but now the vehicles need to be improved to better observe and respond to their surroundings, said Tyson Hedrick, an assistant professor of biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who is working on a similar project, also funded by the Navy. The goal is to build vehicles that can fly close to the earth’s surface in an environment filled with such obstacles as trees, buildings, animals, and other airborne vehicles, he said.

“One of the visions that we’re chasing here is to be able to make microair vehicles a lot more autonomous than they are now,’’ said Hedrick, whose research team is exploring how thousands of bats swarm out of a cave simultaneously without crashing into each other. “That’s the difficult thing we’re trying to figure out: How do animals do it so well and so naturally?’’

The kind of robotics needed to navigate such a tiny spy plane would also have tremendous commercial benefit, Hedrick and Tedrake said. There has been a boom in unmanned aerial vehicles, Tedrake added, and “it’s absolutely clear that there will be another boom when they’re flying where birds fly and where humans can’t fly.’’