Remember how this Dutch drone start-up has tried to break onto the drone market by making UAVs that look like birds? The company is literally called The Drone Bird Company, so if you needed any clues as to what they do, there you go.

Or these researchers in South Australia who made this ornithopter, inspired by the hummingbird?

Well; we have invoked these memories from your long-terms archives to update that engineers from the University of Surrey in the UK have taken this path too: they are bird-inspired developing fixed-wing, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) of their own.

The engineers have made the drones to be capable of performing agile manoeuvres, such as perching or obstacle avoidance, by studying the flight behaviour of owls and other precision flyers in a project they have called ‘Learning2Fly’.

The project aims to overcome key limitations of conventional drones, particularly in environments where space is tight and wind conditions are unpredictable.

“Nature has already solved many of the challenges we face in drone flight,” said Dr Olaf Marxen, a Senior Lecturer at the university, who is part of the project.

“Birds of prey can perform incredibly precise manoeuvres in complex environments, and we’re using those lessons to make fixed-wing drones smarter, more agile and better suited to cities with tall buildings or rapidly changing wind conditions

“We’re combining experimental flight data with machine learning to help drones predict and control their motion in real time to imitate a bird’s typical flight path.

“Traditional simulations such as computational fluid dynamics fall short in turbulent environments and are prohibitively expensive, so our next step is refining the predictive model and testing outdoors, bringing us closer to deployment.”

Unlike standard rotary-wing drones, which are highly manoeuvrable but energy-intensive, fixed-wing drones are far more energy-efficient and capable of covering longer distances, making them ideal for applications such as wind turbine inspections at sea.

At the time of reporting, there has not been any updates on what these drones will be applied to, what type of payloads they will carry and how long they can endure in the air on a single battery charge.

However, the team said it was working on solving the long term conundrum of drones typically lacking the agility needed to fly safely and precisely through turbulent or cluttered airspace, through allowing this new class of UAVs to operate with far greater control and adaptability by harnessing wing aerodynamics.

The testing manoeuvres are conducted in real-world experiments using Surrey’s motion capture lab. A number of lightweight prototypes have already been built and tested, some of which were adapted from commercial toy planes, to track their motion in 3D using onboard sensors and high-speed cameras.

The data collected is being fed into a machine learning model, helping the team predict drone behaviour without relying on conventional aerodynamic simulations. 

“We’ve already presented some of our early findings, and it’s exciting to see how well the drone performs even at this stage,” said Owen Wastell, University of Surrey PhD student and project co-lead.

“It’s humbling that in an era of advanced machines and technology, we’re still looking to the natural world – and one of the oldest living species on the planet – for inspiration.”

With further testing planned for outdoor environments, the researchers hope the project will lay the groundwork for a new generation of agile, energy-efficient drones guided by nature.