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Pigeons once delivered the results of the Olympic games in Greece. They carried messages across enemy lines during the First World War and in B.C., the birds have also been used to smuggle drugs into prisons.
Now, some researchers in Vancouver have given them another assignment: help design smarter drones.
A University of British Columbia-led study, published in the Current Biology, fitted homing pigeons with miniature backpacks carrying a tiny computer and head-mounted cameras to track how their eyes move during flight.
The full system weighed about 27 grams, which included a computer about half the size of a credit card, a modified commercial camera and sensors recording the birds’ movement and orientation.
Anthony Lapsansky, who conducted the research as a postdoctoral fellow at UBC, said getting the equipment onto a pigeon involved a “lot of practice” and plenty of trial and error.
Lapsansky said he sewed many different sizes of falconry hoods to hold the camera in place on the pigeon’s head and little backpacks for the rest of the equipment.
“I would sit on my couch making these little hoods,” said the researcher, who previously worked as a falconer. “We incorporated fake backpacks on the pigeons first so that they could get comfortable with it over the course of weeks, slowly adding more complexity so … they didn’t panic.”
UBC researchers equipped pigeons with small backpacks and heat-mounted cameras to track how they fly and, hopefully, improve how drones fly, too. The Early Edition host Steven Quinn spoke with one of the researchers, Anthony Lapsansky, about how the project went.
The researchers worked with a flock of about 16 pigeons who were released along a route the birds already knew.
Because they were homing pigeons, they flew back to their home loft and the researchers would then remove the equipment and retrieve the recorded footage.
Eyes not fixed in place during flight
The UBC study showed that the pigeons make slow, subtle eye movements that may help them gather more information about their surroundings.
“Pigeons are actively moving their eyes to potentially gain a higher-resolution view of the scene,” said Lapsansky.
Researchers also found the pigeons turned both eyes inward while landing on a perch, allowing them to look at the perch with both eyes at once.
“That suggests they might be processing depth information in a similar way that humans do,” explained Lapsansky.
The findings challenge the general assumption that pigeons, whose eyes are positioned on the sides of their heads, keep their eyes still while flying.
David Bird, an emeritus professor of wildlife biology at McGill University who was not involved in the research, said scientists had assumed birds locked their eyes to avoid complicating the visual information produced by their own movement.
“Fixing their eyes in place makes going from A to B much easier to do. But the [UBC] study is showing that is not the case.”
Another recent study, published in the same journal last month, concluded that pigeons largely locked their eyes in place during flight.
Bird said that study done by the California Institute of Technology followed pigeons over a relatively short distance and closer to surrounding objects but the UBC birds flew farther and higher.
Bird said pigeons may keep their eyes steadier when flying low through a cluttered space but scan more widely when higher in the air for reasons like watching for predators.
“It doesn’t mean that the two studies aren’t correct,” he said. “One of them used pigeons flying low to the ground and a short distance. The other one put pigeons high up in the air.”
They’re part of the city landscape just about everywhere: a marvel in the air, fun to feed and a testament to nature’s resilience. But as we’ll discover pigeons are also misunderstood.
What pigeons could teach drones
Many drones use rigid cameras and other sensors to determine their speed, direction and proximity to objects, said Lapsansky.
“Birds use vision to do all these things, but they are also moving their “cameras” to get even more information from the environment,” he said.
Lapsansky said engineers could eventually apply a similar approach by giving autonomous drones cameras that move while navigating.
Bird, who has worked with drones for 16 years for things like observing birds’ nests, said more adaptable cameras could improve drones.
“The cameras from those drones are not that sophisticated really,” he said. “If you had a drone with a much more sophisticated camera that could fixate on whatever they’re chasing after, then that would be much more effective.”
