drone flight | 2016-10-05

recently, scienceticians have been trying to figure out a good system and/or algorithm with which to program small drones in order to help them avoid crashing when flying toward or beside each other in groups.

the military has been working on this conundrum for a long while but different pieces come into play when dealing with large fighter jets than with small things like consumer-level drones.

so, being the smart scienceticians they are, they opted to study how the birds do it — specifically, budgerigars.

there are a variety of neat things that the budgies (and many other small birds who fly in large flocks) do to avoid each other: bigger birds tend to move above smaller birds; there are semi-apparent social rankings that also tend to mean one bird will fly above another; etc.

this all becomes very confusing and difficult to study when your flying patterns are caught up in the middle of this:

as an aside, these budgies, with their less than pea-sized brains, process their trajectories and required course adjustments in roughly 0.42 secs. that’s really fast, especially within the midst of a majestic cloud of feathers like the one above.

but the main thing that is very apparent when studying the budgerigars and all the other little birds that might really help the drones is this: they fly right.

that’s it — fly right… sometimes a little up or down but always right… never left… just right.

awesome

also, in unrelated news, here is a great .gif from uhaul illustrating the paramount importance of proper weight distribution when hauling a trailer — for reference, they recommend a 60/40 split, front to back:

so far on drone flight and weight ratios (of an unladen budgerigar??)