It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a drone! Biomimicry drones made at NM Tech imitate birds

Strolling the campus at New Mexico Tech in Socorro, you might come across birds that don’t look quite right.

Upon further inspection, the duck paddling in the pond and the pigeon on the perch might not actually be birds — but drones made of taxidermy, the pet project of professor Mostafa Hassanalian.

Hassanalian’s drone made national headlines over a year ago and sparked conspiracy theories that the drones would be used for mass surveillance.

When asked about the “birds aren’t real” conspiracy, a viral internet theory that satirically suggests that the U.S. government invented birds to spy on the public, Hassanalian laughed and said that the drones are intended to observe wildlife, not people.

And in their current state — cameras conspicuously sticking from their quirked feathered necks and wires poking from their undersides — they’re not fooling anyone, at least not yet.

“Uncanny “ and “attention-grabbing” is how October Barnes, an undergraduate student at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, described the drones, which she first saw during a biology seminar class.

“My initial reaction was a kind of horror at this combination of flesh and machine,” Barnes told the Journal. “When he brought out the drones I was thinking, that’s not biomimicry. That’s just stealing from nature.”

Hassanalian, fascinated by the complexities of nature and evolution, has been prototyping what he calls “biomimicry drones” since 2013 while pursuing his first master’s degree.

“Nature, by itself, is amazing, because it’s a treasure of millions of years of evolution that you can learn from to develop different types of systems that might be much more efficient,” Hassanalian said.

The drones are meant to observe and monitor wildlife in as minimally invasive a way as possible. Current drones are too loud and aggressive to adequately study the natural, undisturbed behaviors of animals, Hassanalian said.

Upon hearing a drone, animals might flee or fight back, Hassanalian said, and birds of prey often are injured while attacking drones.

“We don’t want to hurt nature; we want to help nature, right?” Hassanalian said. “So this is a (drone) technology that impacts them.”

No birds are harmed in the process of making these prototypes, Hassanalian said. He buys taxidermied birds from Albuquerque and retrofits them with tech to make them flap, paddle or perch.

Hassanalian has developed three bird drones alongside graduate students Samuel Maimako and Darion Vosbein, and undergraduate student Logan Moore.

“Birds have always been an inspiration to man,” said Maimako, who hopes this research can further the study of aerodynamics by following nature’s lead.

He cited the Arctic Tern, a small bird that can fly 1.8 million miles in a lifetime, as a principal inspiration.

Hassanalian is also working on other biomimicry drones for extraterrestrial exploration, robots that jump and crawl like spiders, or miniature drones that disperse like the seeds of a dandelion.

Perhaps the researchers’ strangest creation is yet to be unveiled.

For a Thanksgiving Day surprise, Maimako and Vosbein are working on making the notoriously flightless turkey airborne. The first flight tests of the turkey drone took off Sunday outside of the university’s library.

As a biology student, Barnes was dismayed that national media interest began and ended with the feathered robots.

“Every time I see that (headline), I feel a little disappointed because, as much as I respect and admire Dr. Mostafa’s work, I don’t want NMT to be known for these taxidermied drones. I wish that our other research and engineering feats got more attention.”