
Meeting Abstract
Everyday observations show birds flying stably in strong lateral gusts in which aerial robots cannot operate reliably. However, the mechanisms that birds use to negate lateral gusts are unknown. Therefore, we studied the motions of lovebirds as they flew through strong gusts in a long mesh corridor. The corridor was painted to simulate a forest (vertical stripes), a lake (horizontal stripe), and a cave (dark with a small light at the end). Fan arrays outside the corridor imposed three wind conditions: still air, a uniform gust, and wind shear. We found that lovebirds consistently yaw their body into the wind direction, crabbing like a fixed-wing aircraft, while keeping their head oriented towards the landing perch, unlike aircraft. Remarkably, these results were the same for all three visual conditions, showing how lovebirds can even negate gusts in the dark with only a faint point light source as a target. Furthermore, because the naive birds had never experienced gusts before, the gust mitigation behavior is innate. Motivated by these observations, we developed a physical model to mechanistically explain wind negation in birds. The findings offer inspiration for designing aerial robots that are robust to gusts.