Who among us hasn't stared up at a hawk or a vulture circling lazily in the sky and wondered how they stay aloft so long? Or wondered how sky-darkening flocks of migrating birds can travel thousands of miles so quickly and so effortlessly? Researchers are now able to tackle these questions more systematically using biomimicry, the process of imitating nature's systems to solve complex human problems. Their goal is to develop an artificial intelligence algorithm that will allow gliders -- either piloted or autonomous sailplanes -- to mimic the flight behavior and endurance of birds. Soon, AI in aviation will transform the types of missions that gliders perform.

Birds do it but bees don't. I've done it, a little. Of course, I'm talking about piloting a sailplane, which is what soaring aficionados call their craft (almost everyone else calls it a glider). The entire point of a sailplane is to gather its energy from warm rising air currents. Sailplanes have no engines, but they do have the usual aircraft flight controls: rudder, elevator, ailerons, and almost always spoilers.

A machine learning project to build an autonomous sailplane that remains aloft on thermal currents is impressive enough. But the work conducted by Microsoft researchers Andrey Kolobov and Iain Guilliard will also improve the decision making and trustworthiness of IoT devices, personal assistants and autonomous cars. The constraints limiting the computational resource of weight and space imposed by the airframe of the sailplane adds relevance to the many new developments in ubiquitous computing. The autonomous sailplane is controlled by a 160MHz Arm Cortex M4 with 256KB of RAM and 60KB of flash running on batteries that monitor the sensors, run the autopilot and control the servo motors, to which the researchers have added a machine learning model that continuously learns how to autonomously ride the thermal currents. In the these early days of platforms like digital assistants, IoT and autonomous vehicles, there are hundreds of open problems that will be distilled into a handful of scientific questions that first must be answered to build products that match popular visions of them.

Microsoft researchers have created a system that uses artificial intelligence to keep a type of glider known as a sailplane in the air without using a motor, by autonomously finding and catching rides on naturally occurring thermals, similar to how many birds stay aloft. "Birds do this seamlessly, and all they're doing is harnessing nature. And they do it with a peanut-sized brain," says Ashish Kapoor, a principal researcher at Microsoft. For a machine to do it requires a complex set of AI algorithms that can identify things like air temperature, wind direction and areas where it is not allowed to fly. Then, the system must use other AI methods to take that information and make real-time predictions about where it might find its next ride on a thermal.

Microsoft is working on an autonomous aircraft that can fly for long periods of time without any power. Rather than a motor, the glider relies on artificial intelligence that mimics how birds fly, autonomously finding thermals, or invisible columns of air that rise due to heat, to carry it for long distances. A recent test of the 16.5-foot aircraft - called a sailplane - conducted in the middle of the desert in Hawthorne, Nevada proved successful - the algorithms researchers developed to help it predict where thermals would appear next worked and kept it aloft. Microsoft is working on an autonomous aircraft that can fly for long periods of time without any power. 'Birds do this seamlessly, and all they're doing is harnessing nature,' Ashish Kapoor, a principal researcher at Microsoft, said.