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Seagull flight strategies could help UAV flight planning, according to a team from the universities of Swansea and Bristol which examined how gulls exploit updraughts from buildings (writes Peter Donaldson). Team leader Emily Shepard, senior lecturer in the Department of Biosciences at Swansea, and Cara Williamson and Shane Windsor from the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Bristol, used computational fluid dynamics to model how the birds react to airflows around buildings. They found that gulls systematically change their trajectories to exploit features as small as low-rise buildings, varying their positions to choose a narrow range of updraught values rather than simply choosing the strongest. The gulls’ precise positions were consistent with a strategy to improve velocity control in gusty conditions, said the team, arguing that similar flight strategies could help UAVs and have profound implications for flight control and energy use. This chimes with work by other researchers, including the US DARPA research agency and the Munich University of Technology, who have both investigated the dynamic soaring techniques that enable albatrosses to remain airborne for months at a time over open ocean. Dynamic soaring is a figure eight-like flight manoeuvre that takes advantage of horizontal wind speed gradients in a zone 10- 20 m above the water to maintain flight speed and altitude. UAV control Gulls’ role in flight study Gull behaviour around buildings could show how UAVs can save energy