Budgerigars Help Boeing Study into Collision Prevention

budgies

Research revealing birds avoid crashing into each other by veering right may help develop technology to stop mid-air plane collisions. The Queensland Brain Institute at the University of Queensland teamed with Boeing Defence Australia for the first study of its kind, which used budgerigars.The Institute’s Professor Mandyam Srinivasan said the study had enormous potential for automated anti-crash systems.

“There’s more and more aircraft populating our air spaces, and there’s going to be all sorts of drones moving around in fairly uncontrolled ways,” he said.

“They’re going to have to act … independently of each other and come to a mutual compatible solution one day when aircraft confront each other.

“It’s ridiculously simple; in hindsight it seems so obvious.”

During the 18-month study, scientists released budgerigars from opposite ends of a tunnel and filmed them with high-speed video cameras.

Professor Srinivasan said the researchers also found the budgerigars moved up or down, depending on their dominance within their flock.

“The bird that’s higher in the pecking order tends to fly lower; that seems to be another rule they use,” he said.

“That’s something you could put into aircraft too,” he said.

He said that should also be adopted to avoid mid-air catastrophes.

“If future aircraft had a known identification number or something like that, they could communicate the identification number to each other and decide which aircraft goes up and which one goes down depending on where they are in the hierarchy.”

The researchers only looked at budgerigars and said further research would have to be conducted to see if veering right was a universal move by all species in both the northern and southern hemispheres.
Boeing expanding partnership with UQ

But Professor Srinivasan said the research showed there are plenty of lessons to learn from nature.

“The way a bee lands, for example, is a simple elegant method which no-one really had thought of until we discovered how they do it, and now we’re starting to put it into aircraft ourselves.”

The results have been published in the peer review Public Library of Science (PLOS one) journal.

Last week, Boeing announced it was expanding its partnership with the University of Queensland by embedding 30 staff at the university to work on various projects including cabin disease transmission, bioterrorism countermeasures, unmanned aircraft and environmental monitoring technologies.

Photo: Steven Pearce: www.stevenpearcephoto.com

Source: ABC News

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *