Terminal attack trajectories of peregrine falcons are described by the proportional navigation guidance law of missiles
Open accessAbstract
Significance: Renowned as nature’s fastest predators, peregrines are famous for their high-speed stooping and swooping attack behaviors. We used miniature GPS receivers to track peregrines attacking dummy targets thrown by a falconer or towed by a drone and fitted a simulation describing the dynamics of the guidance system used in interception. We collected onboard video giving a falcon’s-eye view of the attacks and used this to validate our conclusions for attacks on live targets. Remarkably, we find that the terminal attack trajectories of peregrines are described by the same feedback law used by visually guided missiles, but with a tuning appropriate to their lower flight speed. Our findings have application to drones designed to remove other drones from protected airspace.
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Peregrine flight trajectories follow a guidance law called pure proportional navigation.
“It has been shown experimentally that the flight trajectories of peregrines follow a guidance law called pure proportional navigation (Brighton et al. 2017).”
From Sexual size dimorphism, prey morphology and catch success in relation to flight mechanics in the peregrine falcon: a simulation study (2019) · cites this paper as Brighton et al. 2017
The section ‘Peregrine Terminal Attack Trajectories Are Well Modeled by a PN Guidance Law’ reports that proportional navigation simulations reproduce much of the observed turning in peregrine attacks. The ‘Optimization of the Navigation Constant’ section calls the fitted model ‘pure PN,’ but notes that a trajectory generated by augmented PN could appear to follow pure PN when approximated by that model. The experiments therefore support a good fit to pure PN, not a definitive finding that the birds follow that exact law. (LLM, conf=0.82)
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Cites
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Pursuit and Evasion Strategies in the Predator–Prey Interactions of Fishes
Peterson, A. N., Soto, A. P., & McHenry, M. J. (2021) · Integrative and Comparative Biology · doi:10.1093/icb/icab116 · Cited by 46 · see citing works
Mills, R., Hildenbrandt, H., Taylor, G. K., & Hemelrijk, C. K. (2018) · PLOS Computational Biology · doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006044 · Cited by 30 · see citing works
“6 that has been found empirically in captive-bred peregrine falcons attacking artificial targets [15].”
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Self-citationEmergence of Collaborative Hunting via Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning
Tsutsui, K., Takeda, K., & Fujii, K. (2023) · Lecture Notes in Computer Science · doi:10.1007/978-3-031-37660-3_15 · Cited by 5 · see citing works
- Authors
- Brighton, C. H., Thomas, A. L. R., & Taylor, G. K.
- Affiliations
- University of Oxford (GB)
- Corresponding author
- Taylor, Graham K.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Publisher
- National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2017-12-04
- Volume
- 114
- Issue
- 51
- Pages
- 13495-13500
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- PMC
- PMC5754800
- OpenAlex
- W2773666956
- Cited by
- 92
- References
- 1
- Citations by year
- 2026: 9 · 2025: 7 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 12 · 2022: 14 · 2021: 13 · 2020: 13 · 2019: 11 · 2018: 5
- FWCI
- 7.31
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Aerospace Engineering › Guidance and Control Systems
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Aerospace Engineering › Biomimetic flight and propulsion mechanisms
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Aerospace Engineering › Aerospace Engineering and Control Systems
- Keywords
- Falco peregrinus, missile guidance
- MeSH terms
- Animals, Biomechanical Phenomena, Eye Movements, Models, Theoretical, Movement, Predatory Behavior, Vision, Ocular, Falconiformes
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