Spying On Ducks with a Duck-Shaped Aquatic Drone

What do ducks do when nobody is watching? That question has baffled scientists and philosophers for millennia, because humanity lacked the technology to observe the avians without detection. Some believed the question was inherently unanswerable and that we’d never learn the secrets that ducks keep. But then YouTuber and prominent duck researcher Mostly Functional had an idea: what if he could create a synthetic duck to spy on the local flock in their watery habitat? To achieve that, he built this duck “drone” equipped with an onboard camera to record the action.

Surprisingly, this isn’t the first time someone has attempted to infiltrate a pond o’ ducks in this way. Last year, we covered Jan’s RC duck that could “swim” among its biological brethren. But Jan’s RC duck didn’t have a camera and so it wasn’t capable of recording any first-person evidence of duck behavior. Mostly Functional’s duck drone addresses that shortcoming with real-time video streaming.

Like Jan, Mostly Functional started with a mass-manufactured plastic duck, like you can find at garden stores around the world. With a few careful surgical incisions, Mostly Functional was able to create openings for the necessary components and a cavity to hold the control electronics.

To move around the murky waters of the local pond, Mostly Functional gave the duck a pretty standard RC boat propulsion system. It has a single brushless DC motor with a propeller to provide thrust and a 3D-printed rudder, actuated by a small servo motor, to direct that thrust for steering. A Raspberry Pi Zero W controls those and also records video through a Raspberry Pi Camera module.

The duck communicates with a laptop acting as a ground station through a 5.8GHz wireless connection. Mostly Functional used WFB-ng to stream data, though he doesn’t provide much information on the exact hardware. We do, however, spot external antennas, so it isn’t going through the Raspberry Pi’s onboard WiFi adapter.

The hardware all worked well, but there was a flaw with the design. The camera sits too low on the duck’s hull and actually straddles the waterline, obstructing the view. Mostly Functional attempted to address that in the field by adding material to increase buoyancy, but that didn’t help much.

The result is subpar video that isn’t particularly useful and so, unfortunately, it seems that we may never find out what ducks do when we aren’t looking.