RE: The Great Robot Owl Experiment
Man... this post is SO COOL! Thanks for sharing about your day job.
This is really fascinating work. I'm sure the 4-leggeds and wingeds who have to worry about raptors swooping down to eat them or members of their family are keenly tuned to the presence and habits of birds of prey. When you're prey, you damn well better pay attention! But from my limited, non-prey perspective, the owl and its head movements certainly look realistic. I love that you spent time in the field researching owl behavior to inform your design.
I imagine you are up against the scarecrow phenomenon. As I understand it, birds get habituated to scare crows when they notice they never move. You've addressed that with both the accurate taxidermy and RoboBubo's head movements. It sounds like later models may incorporate other movements.
Does your experimental methodology include ways of detecting when birds have pierced the veil of your illusion? Over time, as we gain some sense of bird linguistics, perhaps we can distinguish "look out everybody, there's an owl on the prowl" from "there's that silly robot again, what do they take us for? Birdbrains?" ;-)
Haha. There actually has been some questioning about the potential of the birds realizing it is a fake and possibly creating a new call. The experiments are usually kept pretty short both to help prevent discovery and to protect the robo-raptor. Some bird are very territorially, especially when nesting, and there have been cases of other birds banding together to attack the robots to try and scare them away. This of course, can end the experiment prematurely. Here is a video with a the lead researcher on the project and a different owl and towards the end you can see a bunch of other birds flying in to intimidate a robo-owl. The video also shows a little bit more of the set-up than I have included in my article. There is actually a video of birds attacking the robo-raptor as well, but I can not seem to locate it right now.
Haha.There has been talk about the potential of animals realizing it is fake and possibly creating a new call. The experiments are usually kept short to avoid this and to protect the robo-raptor. Here is a video with the lead researcher that shows a bit more of the experiment with a different owl. Some birds are very territorial, especially when nesting and there have been cases of them banding together to try and scare off the robo-raptor. You can see this towards the end of this video. There is also a video somewhere of smaller birds attacking the roboraptors to scare them off, but I can't seem to locate it right now.