Stanford students capture the flight of birds on very high-speed video

Graduate student Eirik Ravnan works with a parrotlet that he is training to fly from perch to perch in order to be filmed by a high-speed camera. (Photo: L.A. Cicero)By Bjorn Carey
"The best way to prevent a small drone from spying on you in your office is to turn on the air-conditioning," said David Lentink, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford. That little blast of air, he explained, creates enough turbulence to knock a hand-size UAV off balance, and possibly send it crashing to the floor.
A pigeon, on the other hand, can swoop down busy city streets, navigate around pedestrians, sign posts and other birds, keep its path in all sorts of windy conditions, and deftly land on the tiniest of hard-to-reach perches.
"Wouldn't it be remarkable if a robot could do that?" Lentink wondered.
If robots are to become a bigger presence in urban environments, they will need to.
In order to build a robot that can fly as nimbly as a bird, Lentink began looking to nature. Using an ultra-high-speed Phantom camera that can shoot upwards of 3,300 frames per second at full resolution, and an amazing 650,000 at a tiny resolution, Lentink can visualize the biomechanical wonders of bird flight on an incredibly fine scale...Read here...             [link]