New drone will mimic albatross flight

Albatrosses have 11-foot wingspans that carry them across oceans. But it’s how they use these wings that makes them world-class flyers, according to a University of Cincinnati aerospace engineering professor.

UC Assistant Professor Sameh Eisa and his research partners hope to harness their amazing abilities for the next generation of drones.

But Eisa said there’s more to the bird’s energy-efficient flight than its enormous wings.

“Albatrosses literally have a nose for wind,” Eisa said.

The birds are able to gauge wind speed and direction through their sensitive nostrils, allowing them to make fine flight adjustments to maximize each leg of upward and downward flight path.

Eisa’s analyses show that energy from the wind balances the energy traditionally lost in flight. Meanwhile, the total energy of each dynamic soaring cycle is near constant.

Albatrosses have long associations with the wind in literature. Sailors thought albatrosses were omens of favorable winds. In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the killing of an albatross is blamed for the calm, windless seas that lead an entire crew of 200 to die from thirst, sparing only the mariner who carries the dead albatross around his neck as penance.

Eisa, an applied mathematician, put the birds’ abilities to the test in simulations and found that computers could do no better at charting the optimal course in real time.

“They are solving an optimization problem that is unbelievably complicated,” Eisa said. “They make it look natural and easy.”

The algorithm alone required for dynamic soaring is extremely complicated, Eisa said.

“A few seconds of data can take 100 seconds to generate. And albatrosses are doing it in real time with a high level of accuracy,” he said. “It seems implausible.”

For a drone to fly like an albatross and achieve autonomous soaring, it will have to measure both changing wind speeds and direction to calculate the best angle of attack and rolling action to adjust flight controls in real time, he said.

“If we can get closer to how the albatross does it, we can be more efficient,” he said.

Traditionally, wind is the enemy of drones, Eisa said. But their project is trying to turn this obstacle into an advantage.

Using Eisa’s recent characterization for dynamic soaring as a natural extremum-seeking system, new flight control designs will be developed to mimic dynamic soaring in real time. Researchers will test, validate and implement these designs and methods in experiments by UC’s DARPA industrial team members to demonstrate how much energy dynamic soaring saves compared to normal flight.

Eisa said the project also might shed light on the incredible abilities of albatrosses for physics and biology by validating the underlying hypothesis that dynamic soaring represents a natural extremum-seeking system.

Their experiments will demonstrate how much energy dynamic soaring saves compared to normal flight.

Eisa said the project also might shed light on the incredible abilities of albatrosses.

“If we can fly more efficiently like birds, we’ll have a brighter future for unmanned aerial systems,” he said.

UC Associate Dean of Research Gautam Pillay said Eisa’s pioneering work exemplifies the transformative impact biomimicry is having on next-generation aerospace systems.

“By unlocking the secrets of dynamic soaring, we’re not just advancing unmanned aerial vehicle efficiency — we're addressing critical national defense priorities, such as endurance and adaptability in contested environments,” Pillay said.

The project will give UC students a fantastic opportunity to work on a project with profound implications for the aerospace industry, he said.

“Just as importantly, students will get unparalleled experiential learning opportunities, placing them at the heart of cutting-edge research where theory meets real-world application in collaboration with top-tier institutions and industry partners,” Pillay said.

Mastering the principles of flight is fundamental to aerospace engineering. It’s been a preoccupation of Eisa. In the dinner party debate over the choice of having the superpower of flight versus invisibility, he always chooses flight.

“I think flying is fascinating. It’s something we always yearn to do because we can’t do it,” he said.

That’s one reason biomimicry has been such an important tool for aerospace engineers, he said.

“Nature has been optimizing flight for millions of years of evolution,” Eisa said. “So to take this gift from nature and make it available to humanity is engineering at its best.”

Featured image at top: UC Assistant Professor Sameh Eisa is using cues from nature to develop autonomous controls for drones that use less energy to remain airborne. Photo/Michael Miller