According to a report by Reuters, a team of scientists in New Mexico is using dead birds to develop drones that can study flight techniques that may assist the aviation industry.
The birds aren’t real, but their bodies are.
A research team in New Mexico is converting taxidermic birds into drones in order to study flight patterns, Reuters reported.
Mostafa Hassanalian, a mechanical engineering professor leading the project at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro, said the team started looking into deceased birds after mechanical bird drones weren’t yielding good results.
“We came up with this idea that we can use … dead birds and make them (into) a drone,” Hassanalian, who has extensively studied drones, told Reuters.
“Everything is there,” he added. “We do reverse engineering.”
Scientists hope to use them to study birds’ formations and flight patterns, which can in turn be applied to the aviation industry, Hassanalian told Reuters.
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