Robot birds created to protect airports in the Netherlands

I remember that I was very impressed with Robert Sheckley’s story “The Guardian of a Bird”, read in the teenage period of the NF. The robot bird described there seemed a very distant future, practically impracticable in our time of the project. Time passed, and technology brought that very future closer, making it the present.

Recently, the Dutch company introduced two models of bird robots. True, these robots do not know how to send an electric charge to a person or animal, but they were also created for another purpose. Namely - to protect airports and air transport from birds annoying civil aviation.

According to statistics, about once a day somewhere in the world an airliner must make an emergency landing due to interference in the form of birds. Sometimes birds damage aircraft parts, sometimes they simply do not allow them to fly, due to the flock of birds. As far as I remember, even one of the Shuttle shuttle launches (or the launch of another spacecraft) failed because the woodpeckers damaged thermal protection. In general, birds cause quite tangible financial damage to airlines, in addition, all this is fraught with accidents with human casualties (although disasters caused by birds are very rare).

To scare away birds at the airdromes they set an alarm, stuffed animals, hire special workers. But not much helps.

As for the Dutch company’s project, two robot birds were introduced, one model was a copy of a falcon, the other was a copy of an eagle (to scare away larger birds). The size of the "falcon" is 58 cm long and 120 cm wingspan. The size of the "eagle" is twice as large. The case is printed on a 3D printer, fiberglass is used to strengthen the structure.



Operators operate this robot. In the future, it is planned to make autonomous birds-robots so that humans are minimally involved in the project. After the start of the tests, a 75% decrease in the number of birds at the airport where the tests were conducted was recorded. And even those birds that came back for a long time looked alarmed, these birds tried to spot the falcon / eagle in the sky.

In general, the guard-birds have already gone to work, so to speak. Will we wait for a model with an electric discharger or a laser gun?



Via dailymail