PigeonBot is a pigeon-inspired morphing wing aerial robot for studying feathered avian wing morphing. The robot underactuates 40 real feathers to change wing shape in flight. I was the lead developer of PigeonBot as part of my PhD at Stanford.

We published our work from PigeonBot in Science Robotics and Science in January 2020. A composite image I made of the wing was selected for the cover of Science Robotics’s special issue on bioinspired and biohybrid robots. This work has been featured on NPR, National Geographic, Scientific American, Popular Science, and The Colbert Report among others.

Stay tuned for updates on how we are expanding this work to avian tails and different bird species.