The team's findings undercut an older theory that peregrine falcons' acute sideways vision - their eyes are on the sides of their heads - is integral to their diving abilities. There is an elegance to the fact that it's the same thing control missile engineers have ended up at." "Falcons aren't doing complicated computations to figure out where the target is going to be," Taylor says, "but the behavior that you see almost looks as if they do. That's a lot simpler than measuring your speed and its speed and your direction and its direction, and then calculating an intercept path.Īnd the relative simplicity of proportional navigation - making only slight adjustments to intercept prey - is important when moving at such high speeds. Proportional navigation is based on the idea that, if you're a missile (or a falcon) it's possible to collide with a moving object (or prey) simply by tracking how the line between you and the target is changing. Think missiles launched from ships to knock out incoming projectiles. They found that the path peregrine falcons take toward their prey can be described using the same guidance law, called proportional navigation, that missile engineers developed for missiles with moving targets. "That turns out to be true toward the very end of the intercept," Taylor says, but "it doesn't tell you how the bird is actually controlling its flight." Previous research had suggested that the birds keep a more or less constant line between themselves and their target. A follow-up study will use head-mounted cameras. The resulting video is shaky because the bird's back moves as it flaps its wings the bird's head, by contrast, remains almost perfectly still. In the other 35 flights, a drone towed a spinning bird-like lure on the end of a string, and the falcons dove to catch the lure, ripping it off the drone. In 26 of those flights, the falconer tossed a lure that looked like a small bird and the falcon dove to catch it. They had eight falcons do a total of 61 flights. "It's a sort of ribbon arrangement that goes around the chest, and then a little back plate, and the camera and GPS unit sits on that," he explains. "In terms of how you put it on a bird, it's sort of a bit like a rucksack," explains Graham Taylor, a professor of mathematical biology at Oxford and an author of the study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |