I participated in an interactive falconry demonstration, using a Harris hawk. These creatures can maneuver with incredible precision in extremely tight spaces. It's not surprising to me to see their behavior described like this, with terms from modern control theory.

Watch this, for example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HYGz32iv1vw

They can fly through spaces barely wider than their body (pulling their wings in as tightly as necessary, then immediately unfolding them to continue flying), over a wide range of pitch/roll, while following a curved trajectory, while pursuing prey.

Can you imagine writing software to do that?

To describe the article as an application of modern control theory is an exaggeration; these rules (proportional navigation and proportional pursuit) are extremely simple and ancient. It's difficult to imagine a time when humans didn't intuitively understand the law described in the paper as proportional pursuit, and the idea behind proportional navigation predates guided missiles by hundreds if not thousands of years.

It's a relief that the heavy mathematical prerequisites of optimal control theory aren't needed to understand what the birds do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_navigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constant_bearing,_decreasing_r...

I hesitated to use that term, I know it isn't quite appropriate. I'm still not exactly sure how better to phrase it.

Challenge to HN: Reinforcement Learning to replicate this behaviour in Unity/Unreal and write a blog post about it.

Cool video, ty for sharing the link.

See also: https://youtu.be/ovocT91G1ww Peregrine falcon, the fastest animal on Earth, can see prey one mile away and reaches 200mph when diving.

Anyone else that plays wargame red dragon and thought this was gonna be about the MIM-23 Hawk Anti-Air system? I mean common, guidance system usually refers to machines not living beings.

I was certain to find an article about anti-air missiles as well

I'm not a gamer but I totally agree. My compression of the original headline — "Hawks steer attacks using a guidance system tuned for close pursuit of erratically manoeuvring targets"— to fit within the ≤80 character HN limit led to the misleading shorter title.