I am a Wildlife Biologist who works trying to prevent collisions between wildlife and aircraft. Hawks are a focus area right now and part of our studies involves catching them.
I am trying to put together a mouse decoy that can be used to attract hawks to a trap.
Here are my conditions: battery powered & small (preferably all components would fit inside the area as two decks of cards stacked on top of one another)
Here is the task: move a fake mouse back and forth (motion can be circular in nature) in short bursts, with pauses in between.
my ideas so far(I have zero robotic knowledge): maybe use a servo motor and some kind of controller circuit board to make the servo rotate back and forth every couple seconds, pausing between each movement?
Ideally I am looking for someone to recommend the specific parts I would need to do accomplish this. I am fairly handy, so I would be able to wire and solder the components together and mount them in some kind of unit.
We are glad to hear that you will do this small robotics project!
It doesn’t seem too much complicated, and it can be done in various ways, but still, it needs some work (choosing components, assembling, wiring, programming, debugging).
Anyway, I went shortly through our Robots section. There are already hundreds of robots with instructions how to build them. Maybe you can also have a look to get some ideas about your project.
So, I found interesting one:
Maybe something similar to this could work for you?
So your video got me going down a rabbit trail which ultimately lead me to something cheap and simple that I think will work. I am going to get a cheap servo, a cheap servo tester and a 5v battery. I will put the servo tester on the mode that cycles the servo through its movement range. Its not quite the movement cycle I was looking for, but I think it will work.
maybe a good place to start would be to model the movements of the skeleton of the mouse when it hops, this signature movement will most likely be what the hawks brain is looking for amongst all the noise it gathers in through its eyeballs, the brain having been rewarded before for spotting that particular pattern of kinetic movement will most likely hit on the pattern of movement more so than the visual data when the mouse is holding still. most predators see this way? am I right? then map this motion to a pair of servos that move blocks of foam inside the stuffed mouse body in the right way and then hook it up to a loop of monofilament line and drag the mouse back and forth in your traps kill box. the pair of moving servos will need to be tuned to map the movement right, I would think that you can build a simple program to drive that with an ESP module.
