There were 92 animal strikes near airports in Alaska last year, including 10 at Fairbanks airport, according to a database managed by the Federal Aviation Administration.

Most of those strikes resulted in no damage to the aircraft. But Marlow said that bird-plane encounters can be expensive and dangerous in rare cases where a bird gets sucked up into an engine, potentially causing a crash.

In 1995, an AWACS jet on Elmendorf Air Force Base hit a flock of geese and crashed, killing 24 people. Now, wildlife mitigation teams haze thousands of birds each year as a way to prevent catastrophes.

If Aurora is successful at deterring birds and other wildlife in Fairbanks, Marlow said the agency would price sending similar robots to more rural airports, which he said could be more cost-effective than hiring wildlife biologists.

"We're definitely limited on funding, and there has to be an absolute need of wildlife mitigation at the airport before we'll bring in a USDA employee," he said.

The coyote or fox panels they planned to install would not be hyper-realistic, Marlow said. The agency decided against using animal fur because "we wanted to make sure that it remained completely weatherproof," he said.

He said during the legislative hearing that the idea to use a robot dog came after the agency decided against another plan using flying drones to spray a repellent including grape juice as a deterrent.

"We decided it probably wasn't a good idea to spray in these areas because we didn't know what animals are attracted to grape juice ... and how safe is it having these massive drones at an airport," so they pivoted to a device that doesn't fly, he said.

Boston Dynamics' entry-level dog-bots are used in factories, research laboratories and construction sites to monitor routine operations, scan for potential hazards and conduct safety inspections, according to the company's website.

Aurora is the first of its kind to be involved in wildlife mitigation, Marlow said.

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