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Flying is not often an easy thing, especially at high speed. Though the movies make it look like a fighter pilot can move in and out quickly and effortlessly of any terrain (assuming the pilot has a name and isn’t just “Fighter Pilot 1”) the level of skill required is tremendous. Getting an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to do it is even more difficult. In fact, researchers at MIT have found it can be impossible to accomplish this, but their findings may actually allow UAVs to step it up a notch.

Birds have been flying for much longer than man, and researchers have been puzzled about how they can navigate forests at high speed. In some cases the birds are flying so fast they would not be able to stop in time to avoid a crash, if an obstacle suddenly comes into view. Yet birds would not fly that fast if they were in great danger, so how do they do it? They guess. Instead of relying on just what they see before them, the birds will estimate the density of the forest and fly as fast as is safe. They may be going too fast to stop in time, but they can be confident there is a safe path to take.

The model the researchers created of the bird’s speed and the density of forests showed there is a maximum safe speed. Above this speed, there is a guarantee of a crash, but below this speed, a safe path can be expected to exist. Applying this to UAVs could dramatically increase their speed. Currently, UAVs will travel no faster than their field of view allows. If a UAV can only see five meters in front of it, it will not go so fast as to need more than five meters to stop. With this research though, much more agile robots could be built.