Robot morphs its wings like a pigeon with real pigeon feathers, the PigeonBot II

Amazing stuff! Fly robot fly! (Song by Silver Convention, 1975) 😊

It is getting fancy with robots?

It appears the earliest PigeonBot research dates back to 2020. 

"Researchers in biomimetics have created a robotic bird model with real pigeon feathers to understand how birds manage to fly without a vertical tailfin.

A plane without a vertical tailfin would be less stable but much more energy efficient and less easy to detect via radar. ..."

From the editor's summary and abstract:

"Editor’s summary

Birds exhibit controlled gliding flight without a vertical tail, unlike the necessary rudders on airplanes that damp Dutch roll oscillations. To accomplish rudderless flight, Chang et al. developed a bioinspired aerial robot with morphing wings and tail named PigeonBot II. The robot consists of a biomimetic skeleton and real pigeon feathers that form wings that can spread and a tail that can spread, elevate, tilt, and deviate side to side like a bird. Initial experiments in a turbulent wind tunnel showed that reflexive tail tilting and deviation combined with wing morphing enabled stable flight by damping Dutch roll. Outdoor flight tests further demonstrated that the autonomous reflexive controller provided stability to the robot during take-off, cruise, and landing. ...

Abstract

Gliding birds lack a vertical tail, yet they fly stably rudderless in turbulence without needing discrete flaps to steer. In contrast, nearly all airplanes need vertical tails to damp Dutch roll oscillations and to control yaw. The few exceptions that lack a vertical tail either leverage differential drag-based yaw actuators or their fixed planforms are carefully tuned for passively stable Dutch roll and proverse yaw. Biologists hypothesize that birds stabilize and control gliding flight without rudders by using their wing and tail reflexes, but no rudderless airplane has a morphing wing or tail that can change shape like a bird. Our rudderless biohybrid robot, PigeonBot II, can damp its Dutch roll instability (caused by lacking a vertical tail) and control flight by morphing its biomimetic wing and tail reflexively like a bird. The bird-inspired adaptive reflexive controller was tuned in a wind tunnel to mitigate turbulent perturbations, which enabled PigeonBot II to fly autonomously in the atmosphere with pigeon-like poses. This work is a mechanistic confirmation of how birds accomplish rudderless flight via reflex functions, and it can inspire rudderless aircraft with reduced radar signature and increased efficacy."

Watch this robot adjust its wings like a pigeon

Bird-inspired reflexive morphing enables rudderless flight (open access)

Fig. 1. PigeonBot II morphs its wing and tail reflexively to fly rudderless autonomously.