13 April 2016
By Tereza Pultarova
 |
| The Robird and its inventor Nico Nijenhuis |
A robotic falcon called Robird
has been given its first assignment at a small German airport to demonstrate
its ability to scare away birds.
The Weeze airport, just across
the border from the Dutch town of Nijmegen, will provide ideal conditions to
test the drone technology developed by a team from the University of Twente,
the Netherlands.
The quiet airport, which handles
only around 2.5 million passengers every year, will serve as a test bed for a
possible future deployment of the technology at much busier sites, including
Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport.
"This is a historic step for
the Robird and our company", said Nico Nijenhuis, CEO of Clear Flight
Solutions, a spin-off company from the University of Twente that markets and
develops Robird. “We already fly our Robirds and drones at many locations and
doing this at an airport for the first time is really significant. Schiphol
Airport has been interested for many years now, but Dutch law makes it
difficult to test there. The situation is easier in Germany, which is why we
are going to Weeze.”
The trial will involve training
the operators and air traffic controllers to ensure the robotic falcon doesn’t
present any risk to aircraft.
“If you operate at an airport,
there are a lot of protocols that you have to follow,” explained Nijenhuis.
“You’re working in a high-risk area and there are all kinds of things that you
need to check. We use the latest technologies, but the human aspect also
remains crucial.”
Robird scares away birds by
mimicking the flight of a real peregrine falcon. The birds react to it
naturally as they would to the real predator by flying away to a safer area.
This is a major advantage compared to other means of bird management, which
usually stop working overtime as the clever creatures learn to see through the
trick.
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