Army Deploys Robot Coyotes to Protect Fighter Jets

The US military is working on ways to prevent airplane-bird collisions, an expensive and dangerous consequence of basing operations in areas with wildlife. Now the Army Corps of Engineers’ Engineer Research and Development Center has hit on a promising solution: wheeled drone vehicles that look like coyotes.

The unmanned ground vehicles, or UGVs, are still prototypes, but they are so far effective at scaring off birds and other intrusive wildlife. The acronym-heavy military has been working on BASH (Bird/wildlife Aircraft Strike Hazard) for five years, and has dubbed the UGVs “Coyote Rovers.”

The faux coyotes are being tested at airfields in Kentucky and Florida, including Naval Air Station Pensacola, where the Blue Angels train. The ERDC released a photo of the life-size plastic coyote figures standing sentry over the famous Blue Angels fighter jets.

The Navy had experimented with a quadruped robot built by Boston Dynamics, but found it was too slow and didn’t really intimidate the wildlife as intended. At $70,000 or so per bot, it is also expensive, whereas the Coyote Rover is priced under $3000.

The Department of Defense has tried other tactics to ward off wildlife with varying degrees of success. In Bangor, Washington, the Navy hired hawk handlers to drive away seagulls that were harassing submarine workers. The Air Force has special radars to detect birds and a monitoring system that reports “bird strike risk intensity levels,” ranging from zero (all clear) to eight (Hitchcockian amount of birds). 

Other programs have used GPS tracking collars on real coyotes, which keeps the birds at bay but can’t really be controlled. Unlike the Coyote Rovers, which are remote-controlled or even programmable.

 “They basically have the same functionality as any other drone,” research biologist Shea Hammond tells Army Times. “We can program areas we want to exclude it from going, such as the airfield itself.”

Collisions with aircraft is a serious issue for the military. Between 2007 and 2016, the Air Force reported 45,440 wildlife strikes that did $251 million worth of damage.

Photo credit: Engineer Research and Development Center / Army Corps of Engineers