Pigeon Guided Missiles

I'm not sure if this interests any of you, but I was going through some old newspaper articles and came across something about animals used in warfare, from bats attached to incindiary devices used in Tokyo by the US, to Kuwaiti Field Chickens (KFC) used by our forces in the Middle East. Then I was reminded of a very interesting article I read in a Psychology course about BF Skinner, a behavioral psychologist who proposed the idea of Pigeon guided missiles for use on battleships in WWII when electronics didn't exist. Skinner used "operant conditioning" to train his pigeons to guide a missile, in which a correct behavior would be connected to a food reward as a response. This is how it worked with pigeons:

The pidgeon had been taught to peck at a picture of a battleship and was rewarded with food when it did so correctly. The viewport of the rocket allowed a view of the ocean once in sight of the enemy ship, at which time the pigeon inside would peck at one of four quadrants on a screen that relayed the information to the back of the missile. The missile would then steer accordingly in the direction that the pigeon specified. Instead of a food reward however, the pigeon was rewarded with a spectacular death! In practice, the pigeon guided missile worked, but the navy stated that they would not place their lives in the hands of a pigeon, so it was never used in actual combat. I don't know about you guys, but I say bring it back! Its both cheap AND effective, and may get rid of those pesky rats with wings once and for all!

the problem with that is that you might have the pigeons accidentally attack your own ships.

You could "arm" the pigeons by using a timer for examples before the missile actually responds to them peckers to get enough distance from own ships.

Also you would need a soft launch capabillity for todays missiles, the G-forces of a sudden launch would make meatloaf of the doves....

Also i would think that it would work with smaller birds, like the English House sparrow wich is considered an accidental imported pest in America. While not trainable like doves delivering messages, they are pretty intelligent urban birds and possibly could be trained to peck for food. Less space requirments on the missilesize

Another could candidate for an ALL weather missile would be a species of bats that sees a wide spectrum of sonar, visible light AND ultraviolet light wich is pretty rare for mammals (you could for instance illuminate the target with an ultraviolet beam) Since mammals are usually more intelligent than birds the bats enhanced sensor and processing abbillity would make the engagemnt of complex and moving targets in changing environments possible?

news.nationalgeographic.com...

In fact, the above article discusses how they used target illumination to train the bats to seek food there.

For Air to Air missiles, you put some babysnakes in the cone of your Sidewinder (pun intended) rocket, snakes have infrared sensors that might respond to hot exhaust)




[edit on 28-12-2004 by Countermeasures]

[edit on 28-12-2004 by Countermeasures]

[edit on 28-12-2004 by Countermeasures]

haha, it would be funny to see a snake, sparrow, or bat as the central guidance system. Theoretically, since many creatures that are possible for that kind of use respond to operant conditioning it could work, but I hope we're past the stage where we would consider it a serious possibility (my grandfathers team at NASA actually built the Ring Laser Giro's that I believe are still used today?) I wish I had more information on that but at the time it was a "Black" project and my grandfather couldn't say anything to my father besides its name, and even that was 10 years after it was built.

Zeta, although the pigeons are in complete control of the missile after it is in range of the ship, the probability is very low that the pigeon would attack its own ship since it would have to do an entire 180 to do so. The enemies ship would be in the pigeons screen before it was able to steer, and it should do what its trained from there....but who know, maybe a pigeon could get distracted and keep pecking at a certain quadrant until the friendly ship was in view

[edit on 28-12-2004 by zhangmaster]